The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  With the bestowal of grand titles and vast holdings on a pair of Borgia infants, one of them of distinctly dubious parentage, Alexander carried nepotism to an extreme that few of his predecessors had dared to approach. In doing so he made it at last impossible for anyone to believe, or to credibly argue, that his real purpose in conferring so much wealth and so many lofty positions on members of his family was to protect the interests of the Church. If that claim had always been questionable, now it was simply laughable. The situation that the pope had created was without precedent: almost the whole of the Papal States had been made the hereditary property of his relatives. It was not defensible, and inevitably it aroused widespread resentment.

  Lucrezia’s wedding became the event of the year—of the century, at least as far as Italy was concerned. And again everything was at the expense of the Church. The preparations consumed the attention of the Borgias and everyone closely connected with them throughout midwinter 1501–1502. Alexander, who continued to enjoy robust good health as he entered his seventies—“nothing worries him, he seems to grow younger every day,” Venice’s ambassador reported in an almost complaining tone—continued no less than in his youth to revel in magnificent display. He knew that the people of Rome would judge him by the magnificence with which he marked this grand occasion, and so he poured out the contents of the papal treasury with almost mad abandon, spending even more freely on preparations for the wedding than he had in preparing for Cesare’s visit to France in 1498. Ercole d’Este, having won a jackpot of a wedding settlement, felt free to match the pope’s outlays ducat for ducat, so that the months preceding Lucrezia’s return to married life became an exercise in extravagance on a scale no Roman then living had ever witnessed. A single piece of jewelry that Ercole sent to his future daughter-in-law was said to have a value of seventy thousand ducats.

  The party sent from Ferrara to claim the bride and escort her to her husband and new home arrived in Rome on December 23. It included some fifteen hundred persons, many of them high nobles and churchmen and other notables, and was headed by the bridegroom’s three younger brothers, one of whom, the cleric Ippolito, had been appointed to the College of Cardinals in 1493 in spite of being only fourteen years old. On hand to receive it were all the nobles and officials of the city and nineteen cardinals, each accompanied by two hundred horsemen. Cesare’s personal entourage included scores of Roman nobles and four thousand mounted troops, all wearing his red and yellow livery, and the stallion he rode was adorned with jewels and precious metals. The welcoming ceremony went on through hours of orations, with the pope not participating but looking on contentedly from the upper reaches of the Vatican.

  There followed, after a week during which the whole capital was given over to an unending round of games, tournaments, sporting events, theatrical performances, and other entertainments, a proxy wedding presided over by thirteen cardinals. Another carnival-like week passed before, on January 6, Lucrezia at last bade the pope farewell and rode out of Rome at the center of a retinue of hundreds of sundry dignitaries and a guard of six hundred uniformed horsemen. Her trousseau—trunk after trunk filled with gowns made of the costliest materials to be found in Italy, plus jewels and gold and silver and fine linen and works of art—was strapped to the backs of 150 mules.

  Her departure was a true goodbye, a real change of life. Lucrezia and Alexander would never meet again. Nor would Lucrezia ever again see her little son Rodrigo, who in keeping with custom was not permitted to join his mother as she entered a new marriage. He remained behind, like the Infant of Rome now a permanent member of the papal household.

  Lucrezia was on the road for just a day short of four weeks, making formal visits to all the places of note along the way. At every stop, local lords and ladies eager to curry favor spent more than they could afford on new rounds of entertainment and display. It was exhausting, and disagreeable in other ways as well; forced jollity and manufactured displays of affection were required of everyone involved, and of Lucrezia most particularly, everywhere she went. One of the stops had deeply unpleasant associations: Pesaro, where Lucrezia had once spent tedious months as the wife of Giovanni Sforza. Bologna too must have been excruciating; there the bride was received by Ginevra Bentivoglio, who in addition to being wife of the city’s lord was Giovanni Sforza’s aunt and the grandmother of Astorre Manfredi, now a prisoner in Rome.

  Arrival in Ferrara brought Lucrezia’s first exposure to Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, who had been placed in charge of hospitality by her father Duke Ercole. Lucrezia of course knew that Isabella had opposed the marriage from the beginning and that she remained deeply suspicious of her and doubtful of her moral character. Making things still worse was Isabella’s status as a proud and famous beauty, accustomed to being the center of attention at her father’s court and her husband’s at Mantua and Modena. She saw Lucrezia as a rival, a threat to her preeminence. The effusions of false joy and devotion at this first encounter must have been wonderful to behold.

  At last Lucrezia came face-to-face with her husband, the stolid Alfonso, who is not likely to have troubled himself to bring whatever charm he was capable of mustering to bear upon his new mate. She, in consequence, is not likely to have been overly delighted by what she first saw of him. The marriage was consummated with dispatch all the same, and the festivities went on and on until Duke Ercole was hinting sourly and in increasingly loud tones that perhaps it was time for people to be returning to their own homes. Gradually Ferrara returned to normal. It remained for the truth about Lucrezia’s character to be revealed by the test that now lay before her: the need to go on with life under the cold gaze of a hardheaded father-in-law, a distinctly uninfatuated husband, a hostile sister-in-law, and platoons of other in-laws and courtiers all looking for reasons to find fault.

  An uneasy quiet prevailed across Italy through the first four months of Lucrezia’s new life. There was no war anywhere, aside from the minor clashes that broke out from time to time as Florence continued its harassment of Pisa. Signs of impending trouble, however, were not hard to find. Predictably, the division of Naples between France and Spain had proved satisfactory to neither party, leading almost immediately to skirmishes along the frontier separating the kingdom’s two halves and making a showdown seem not only inevitable but likely to occur soon. In Rome, Cesare was preparing to set forth on a third impresa. His prospects could hardly have been more favorable. He could depend upon France and Spain to be tolerant if not actively supportive; neither would want to alienate him or the pope with a new war for Naples looming. Florence could put no obstacles in his path; what remained of its strength was being drained away by the struggle to retake Pisa. Venice too was otherwise engaged (with the Turks, as usual), Ferrara was now more or less an ally thanks to Lucrezia’s marriage, and the Romagna was his to command. The Colonna had been weakened to the point of irrelevance, and though the Orsini remained strong, Cesare had co-opted them by signing their leading men to condotta.

  Cesare, who with one more successful campaign could make himself supreme in north-central Italy, was almost ready to move. By letting no one know what he intended to do, where he was going to take his army once it was on the march, he spread anxiety from the canals of Venice to the hills of Tuscany. He already had troops stationed at far-flung strategic points. Some were at Cesena, in the hills bordering the far eastern edge of the Lombard Plain, under the toughest of his Spanish lieutenants, Ramiro de Lorqua. Michelotto Corella, almost certainly guilty of strangling the duke of Bisceglie on Cesare’s behalf, was in the Romagna recruiting and training a militia. Other troops waited on the Romagna-Tuscany frontier under Vitellozzo Vitelli and his equally thuggish crony Gian Paolo Baglioni of Perugia. If any of them knew what Cesare was planning, they too were keeping silent.

  The fates, however, proved as capricious as ever and plucked the initiative out of Cesare’s hands. On June 4 the Tuscan city of Arezzo, fed up with the taxes imposed by Florence to finance its war on Pisa, suddenly rebe
lled. It expelled its Florentine governors and called for a restoration of the Medici. Cesare’s man Vitelli, presumably acting without his knowledge, immediately moved in, and he and his 3,500 soldiers were welcomed as liberators by the Arezzans. Vitelli and Baglioni also took possession of the fertile Chiana valley, west of Arezzo and even closer to Florence. All this was a mortal challenge to the Florentines, a flagrant occupation of their home territory. It was made all the more threatening by the appearance, with Vitelli and Baglioni, of the hapless Piero de’ Medici, perpetually in search of an opportunity to become master of Florence once again. These developments immediately brought to the fore the question of where the real power now resided in central Italy. In doing so they left the king of France with no choice but to become involved.

  Vitelli, so consumed by hatred of the Florentines as to be nearly incapable of behaving responsibly, was the worst possible man to be in the middle of this situation. One historian has suggested that, being no friend of the Borgias in spite of being in Cesare’s pay, he had encouraged the Arezzans to rebel, hoping to put the blame on Cesare and thereby turn the French against him. An alternative hypothesis is that Cesare, upon learning of the rebellion, ordered Vitelli to occupy Arezzo in order to gauge just how determined the French king was to protect Florence. It quickly became clear that he was very determined indeed: he sent unequivocal orders for Vitelli and Baglioni to pull out of Arezzo immediately. When the two of them ignored this edict, Cesare as their employer was put in a severely awkward position. He decided not to be deflected, however, from the execution of his own plans.

  The Arezzo crisis accelerated everything. Just two days after the start of the rebellion two corpses, their hands and feet bound, were found in the Tiber River. One was the body of Astorre Manfredi, late lord of Faenza, the other of the illegitimate half-brother who had been his comrade in arms through the long winter when Cesare had them and their city under siege. Both youths, following their negotiated surrender, had become members of Cesare’s entourage, then prisoners in the Castel Sant’Angelo. And now they were dead. No one but Cesare could have been responsible. His motive is not hard to guess: to remove a popular young leader in support of whom the people of Faenza might themselves have rebelled. Four days after the discovery of the bodies, having cleared the decks, Cesare was on the move. He led his army out of Rome and headed north and east. As before, no one appeared to have any idea of where he was going or what he intended to do.

  Word spread that his objective was Camerino, a city-state of some thirty thousand inhabitants ninety miles north of Rome. It was in a sense an improbable target. Being well to the south of Cesare’s Romagna conquests, it could never be easily integrated into the state he was assembling. But it was also a rich little city ruled by a particularly unpopular tyrant. The seventy-year-old Giulio Cesare Varano, who as a young man had seized power by murdering his brother (fratricide having been an almost regular occurrence among the Varani from early in the thirteenth century), had been declared an outlaw for failing to pay the annual tribute owed to the Vatican. He was also, along with his four arrogant sons, hated by his subjects. If brought under attack, the Varani would inspire none of the loyalty that had made it so difficult to take Faenza from the Manfredi.

  All such speculation turned out to be irrelevant when, in a lightning stroke that stunned the whole of northern Italy, Cesare abruptly changed direction and, moving his army through sixty miles of rugged mountain country in an astonishing forty-eight hours, fell not upon Camerino but upon the far greater prize of Urbino fifty miles to its north. Urbino was then what it remains today: one of the jewels of northwestern Italy. A beautiful little city on a high hill, it was towered over by the magnificent palace made possible by the colossal earnings of the duke who built it, Federico da Montefeltro, second only to Francesco Sforza of Milan among the great condottieri of the fifteenth century. His son and successor, the same Guidobaldo da Montefeltro who had been Juan Borgia’s co-commander in the failed attack on the Orsini with which Alexander VI opened his reign, was urged by the townsfolk to organize a defense as soon as they understood that Cesare’s army was coming down on them.

  The refined Guidobaldo, more scholar than soldier, saw no point in doing anything of the kind. He sensibly concluded that the likely result of resistance would be the destruction of everything his father had built and catastrophe for Urbino’s people. He therefore departed with his wife Elisabetta, who as a Gonzaga of Mantua was now related by marriage to Lucrezia Borgia and therefore to Cesare himself. (In an all-too-typical example of the arcane ways in which all the leading families of Italy had come to be interconnected, Lucrezia’s third marriage had made Cesare the brother of the bride of Elisabetta’s brother Francesco Gonzaga’s wife’s brother Alfonso d’Este. Diagrams are required to make such things understandable.)

  When Cesare reached Urbino on June 21, he met with no resistance and was able to take possession of the city without a blow being struck or a drop of blood shed. He found the ducal palace filled with treasures of every description, everything the Montefeltri family had accumulated over the generations, the magnificent library that Duke Federico had devoted much of his life to assembling included. He ordered all of it packed up for transfer to Cesena, now a base of Borgia operations in the north and under the command of the fierce and faithful Lorqua.

  The conquest of Urbino was, depending on one’s point of view, either a stroke of tactical brilliance or the cynical betrayal of a blameless duke. Possibly it was both, but it is less than certain that Guidobaldo was entirely innocent. Cesare, who rarely troubled to explain himself, chose to do so in this case, claiming that he had decided to move against Urbino only after learning that Guidobaldo was secretly sending assistance to the outlawed Giulio Cesare Varano in Camerino. This is not necessarily untrue. It would have been prudent of Guidobaldo to surmise that if Camerino were allowed to fall into Cesare’s hands, Urbino would become a convenient and logical next target. Nor would he have been wrong in supposing that, by helping Varano and his sons to hold off Cesare at Camerino, he might save Urbino from attack. What mattered, however, was Cesare’s capture of an extraordinary prize at almost no cost. This enhanced his stature as the most dangerous man in Italy after Louis XII.

  Two questions were on every mind. What was Cesare going to do next, and what was his ultimate objective? When he sent word to Florence that he had important matters to discuss, the city’s signoria hastened to respond. They assigned one of the republic’s leading diplomats, Bishop Francesco Soderini, to hurry to Urbino. There he was to do everything possible to keep Cesare out of Tuscany and get Vitelli and Baglioni out of Arezzo and the Val di Chiana.

  Soderini was a capable man, experienced, sophisticated, and clever. He was also a member of one of Florence’s most distinguished families; in this same year, his brother Piero would be appointed to the new and immensely prestigious position of gonfalonier for life. It was unthinkable to send such a high dignitary on such a sensitive mission without a private secretary, and a worthy one at that. So when the bishop rode out of Florence en route to Urbino, at his side was a rising young diplomat and civil servant named Niccolò Machiavelli.

  Background

  THE ANGEL’S CASTLE

  ONE THING AT LEAST REMAINED CONSTANT THROUGH ALL THE transformations the city of Rome underwent during the thousand years preceding the arrival of the Borgias. The massive bulk of the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Castle of the Holy Angel, continued to loom over the Tiber River where it passes closest to the Vatican. The Castel was already hundreds of years old when the Roman Empire fell. It was approaching its seven-hundredth birthday when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman emperor, and it would be midway through its second millennium when work began on the great basilica that dominates St. Peter’s Square today.

  The Borgias, once they were on the scene, soon learned what everyone learned who was involved in the politics of Rome: that the Castel was the city’s sole impregnable fortress, the place that no ruler
seeking to be safe could afford to be without.

  There is irony in this. When built, the Castel was not intended for any military purpose—or even for the use of living human beings. It was a mausoleum, a crypt, the creation of the Emperor Hadrian, the second-century Spaniard who also built the famous wall across the north of Britain. When he came to the throne in 117 AD, Rome already had a grand mausoleum for the ashes of deceased emperors and their families, a massive affair built by Augustus in 28 BC. But its last available niche had been filled with the remains of the Emperor Nerva in 98 AD. Nerva’s successor and Hadrian’s immediate predecessor, Trajan, finessed the problem by arranging to have himself interred beneath the immense column that bears his name and has been one of Rome’s landmarks ever since. Hadrian, however, found this an unsatisfactory expedient. In the early 130s he ordered work begun on a structure so ambitious that it would not be completed in his lifetime. His contemporaries, finding nothing to compare it with even in the imperial capital, described it in terms that evoked the gigantic monuments of ancient Egypt.