by G. J. Meyer
Hadrian’s Tomb, as it was called almost from the start, was an enormous squat cylinder resting on an even bigger boxlike base of four equal sides, all of it sheathed in fine Parian marble and faced with Ionic and Corinthian colonnades. The outer wall of the upper cylinder provided the base for a ring of statues that encircled a garden-in-the-sky, and at the elevated center of this garden, towering over the entire neighborhood, was a kind of cupola sheltering an almost preposterously outsize statue of Hadrian, the head of which can be seen today in one of Rome’s museums. The burial chamber was at the center of the basement level. Persons granted admission to the interior could ascend to the garden through a spiral passageway that was eleven feet wide with a thirty-foot ceiling.
Hadrian, one of the empire’s more capable rulers, was not the first person to be buried in his tomb. He was preceded in death by his adopted son and intended successor, just as two centuries before Augustus had lost a stepson and two grandsons before expiring himself. Hadrian was joined in due course by generations of later emperors, including such famous figures as Marcus Aurelius, his son Commodus, and Septimus Severus. The last burial was that of the Emperor Caracalla, assassinated in 217, after which the structure was incorporated into a new city wall and stood dormant until, two centuries later, Rome came under threat from Germanic invaders. At that point the city’s desperate defenders awoke to the fact that Hadrian’s Tomb was by far the most formidable stronghold available to them. Its conversion to military use probably occurred early in the fifth century, during the dismal years when the Emperor Honorius presided over the accelerating disintegration of the empire. Though it gradually lost much of its original grandeur—in 537 Hadrian’s magnificent statues were hurled down on attacking Ostrogoths—unlike the Tomb of Augustus it was never reduced to a heap of crumbling ruins.
The year 530 was memorable for a terrible Tiber flood, a consequent outbreak of plague, and a resulting change of name for the tomb. This happened because Pope Gregory the Great, in leading a procession of penitents across the bridge that Hadrian had constructed adjacent to his mausoleum, happened to look up and saw the majestic figure of Saint Michael the Archangel returning to its sheath a bloody sword. This was a sign, as Gregory explained to the faithful, that the epidemic was at an end. It did abate in any case, and Hadrian’s Tomb became the Castel Sant’Angelo.
Visitors from the spirit world notwithstanding, the Castel became the setting for nightmarish dramas. The imprisonment, torture, and murder of successive popes that punctuated the so-called pornocracy of the tenth century all took place in the Castel, which subsequently was fought over by the baronial clans and by popes and antipopes. The Colonna had possession for a time, but lost it in a nasty little war that ended with their banishment from Rome. A century and a half later, in order to save it from demolition, the pope of the time had to cede it to the Orsini. It was an Orsini pope, Nicholas III, who in 1277 built a fortified passageway to the Castel as a means of escape from the Vatican. By the early fifteenth century the Castel was permanently in the custody of the Church, and a stout and ugly square tower had been installed atop the cylinder, high up where Hadrian’s garden had once been. The marble facade had been stripped away for use in paving the streets.
The Castel had become the key to Rome, or at least to avoiding expulsion. Like the Tower of London in distant England it served a multitude of purposes: stronghold, part-time residence for rulers, prison, symbol of power, refuge in time of danger. Alexander invested heavily in strengthening it and in making it a comfortable retreat.
He also fortified the Passetto di Borgo, the passageway connecting the Vatican to the Castel. It would be the saving of a number of his relatives, at least for a while.
18
“Longing for Greatness and Renown”
“Splendid.”
“Magnificent.”
These are the first two adjectives employed by Niccolò Machiavelli in the description of Cesare Borgia that he writes as the two are getting to know each other in Urbino in the hair-raising summer of 1502.
This lord is truly splendid and magnificent, he reports to his masters in Florence. In the pursuit of glory and territory he is unceasing and knows neither danger nor fatigue.
Such words are remarkable, coming as they do from Machiavelli of all people. Few men in history have been less easy to impress. He will be famous forever for the wryness of his observations, the cool detachment with which he arrives at his sometimes stunning insights, and above all the fathomless cynicism that pervades his classic work The Prince. His writings drip with contempt for some of the greatest figures of his day. To see him lavishing praise on someone he has just met, an adversary five years his junior, is not only unexpected but little short of astonishing.
Despite all the reasons he has to despise Cesare and depict him in the ugliest possible terms—he is, after all, a mortal danger to the Republic of Florence—Machiavelli’s description reads like a hymn of praise, a rapture, almost a love song. Cesare is loved by his soldiers, he writes. Cesare is victorious and formidable, and enjoys constant good fortune. As the words pile up, one begins to wonder if Machiavelli has lost the ability to think critically, if he is in the grip of something akin to infatuation. Once again, as with Cesare’s domination of Pope Alexander, we catch a reflection of the power, the raw charisma, of his personality. Of the almost preternaturally magnetic force felt by almost everyone who ever came near him, and of the physical appeal that came with being what he was repeatedly called: “the handsomest man of his time.” The historian Pandolfo Collenuccio wrote of the grown-up Cesare in 1500 that he was “accounted valiant, joyous, and open-handed, and it is believed that he holds honest men in high esteem.” In a flash of almost Machiavellian insight, Collenuccio further described Cesare as “filled with aspiration” and having “a longing for greatness and renown.”
Machiavelli himself looked deeper and saw more. He decided that Cesare, more than anyone else then living, had the vision, the boldness, and the strength of character needed to rescue Italy from the divisions that had made it so vulnerable to invaders.
In company with Francesco Soderini, Machiavelli had arrived in Urbino around sundown on June 24 at the end of a hard ride over the Apennines. The two were given accommodations in the city’s episcopal palace, Soderini being a bishop, and shortly before midnight were taken to see Cesare. Rarely are historians given a greater gift than this: that as acute an observer as has ever lived should visit and report upon one of the most strikingly memorable figures of the Renaissance. And that they should continue to meet as Cesare’s story unfolds, the result being a kind of three-dimensional portrait extended, and evolving, over time.
It is irresistibly fascinating, the image of these two young men, each destined in his own way and on his own schedule for failure and eternal fame, facing each other for the first time. They have been brought together not just by great events but by need. Cesare needing Florence—needing something from Florence, certainly, in spite of the city’s weakness and the conquests that have made him so feared. Machiavelli and the bishop, in their turn, needing something from Cesare—needing above all to find some way of keeping him as far from Florence as possible. Reduced to a single word, that is their mission: to keep Cesare away.
They meet in one of the numerous vast and high-ceilinged chambers of Urbino’s glorious ducal palace, still unfinished in 1502 but already comprising more than 250 rooms. On one side, alone behind an expanse of polished tabletop, sits Cesare, master of the situation no less than of the sleeping city of Urbino. Cesare the crafty, the self-dramatizing, playing his little trick of meeting with callers in the middle of the night, a single burning candle placed behind him so that he can see the faces of his visitors while his own remains in shadow. Dressed as always in a simple black tunic that sets off his ivory skin and is adorned with nothing except the emblem of the Order of St. Michel that the king of France first placed around his neck. Cesare the conqueror. Valentino.
Oppos
ite, alongside the bishop he serves, sits Machiavelli the mere secretary, the civil servant, the promising junior diplomat. He is nobody’s idea of handsome, with his close-set eyes in a long ovoid face that narrows down to a sharp chin. If there is not much strength in that face, there is mischief in the eyes, the trace of a smile flickering about the thin lips. Cesare will learn to enjoy Machiavelli’s company, and it is not hard to see why. In addition to their shared fascination with power—Cesare the practitioner, Machiavelli one of the most original students the subject has ever had—they have in common a lively wit and a kind of intelligence that can be hard and cold as ice. If Machiavelli is perhaps not capable of rising to Cesare’s level of ruthlessness—life will give him no opportunity to find out—he is certainly capable of appreciating Cesare’s attainments in that regard. They have been brought together by matters vital to both of them, under circumstances that make it impossible for either to be entirely forthright. Each has to look for hidden meanings in whatever the other says. Something clicks between them all the same. They are more than shrewd enough, both of them, to take each other’s measure quickly, and to see how well they are matched.
At this first meeting, which continues into the small hours of a new day, Cesare and his visitors spar cordially, engaging in oblique attempted bluffs. Cesare complains, accurately enough, that Florence has failed to carry out the terms of the previous year’s agreement, which was, boiled down to its implicit essence, a promise to pay him not to attack. Soderini counters by suggesting, not implausibly though the truth of the matter cannot be known to him and remains unknown to the present day, that Cesare colluded in the seizure of Arezzo and the Val de Chiana by Vitellozzo Vitelli and Gian Paolo Baglioni. The two try to trump each other in laying claim to the support of Louis XII, whom they know to be quite powerful enough to obliterate not only Florence and the Borgias but their enemies and friends as well.
The king of France, as it happens, is a subject of which Cesare and Machiavelli share exceptional personal knowledge. Both have spent long anxious months at Louis XII’s court. Both went there—at separate times—in search of favors. And both, after much frustration, were ultimately successful: Cesare in obtaining a dukedom, a bride, and adoption as one of the king’s favorites, Machiavelli in winning a promise of protection for Florence. What Cesare now hints—that Louis will raise no objection if he simply seizes Florence and installs there a government that can be depended upon to do his bidding—would have seemed plausible to many listeners. It may even have frightened Soderini. Machiavelli, however, knows better and is less impressed than amused. He knows that Louis, in addition to being in real need of Borgia support, is also seriously short of money, is going to need Florence’s banks, and can have no interest in allowing Cesare to take control of the Florentine territories through which French troops will soon have to pass on their way to Naples.
Still, not even Machiavelli can find anything amusing about the note on which Cesare ends the meeting. He is not, he declares, going to put up with procrastination or prevarication. Florence has to decide: it is his friend or his enemy, and there is no middle ground. If it chooses to be his friend, it has nothing to fear; it possesses nothing that he wants. If the signoria is worried about a possible restoration of the Medici, nothing could be more obvious than that Cesare is in the business of removing, not installing, tyrants. If on the other hand Florence rejects his friendship, he will have no choice but to respond as he thinks best. Thus does the threat of invasion hang in the night air as Cesare dismisses his visitors, advising them to stand by for further talk on the morrow.
The next morning, finding themselves unsummoned, Soderini and Machiavelli left their quarters and went exploring, no doubt doing their best to imitate casual sightseers while in fact on the hunt for information. Even as sons of Florence, that city of splendor, they must have been impressed by what the Montefeltri family had done with the mountaintop redoubt of Urbino. At a time when a common laborer could expect to earn perhaps fifteen ducats in a year, when 2,500 ducats was sufficient to set up an aristocratic family in a respectable home, Federico da Montefeltro had spent two hundred thousand on the expansion and perfection of his ancestral base. He had spent scores more thousands on acquiring exquisite works of art and on assembling a collection of manuscripts said to surpass the library of Oxford University. And now palace and library alike were being stripped bare, paintings and statues and all the rest being loaded onto carts to be hauled a hundred miles north to Cesare’s rocca at Cesena.
At some point in their tour, presumably to their surprise and undoubtedly to their delight, the two Florentines came upon, or found themselves intercepted by, Paolo Orsini and his cousin Giulio. This pair, well known as soldiers and leading members of their clan, had come to Urbino with Cesare’s army as two of his condottieri. Their encounter with Soderini and Machiavelli may have been awkward, at least at first. Like almost all members of their family, Paolo and Giulio were Medici partisans and enemies of Florence’s current regime. But that morning in Urbino, Soderini and Machiavelli had far less interest in ancient blood feuds than in trying to learn whatever they could, especially about what Cesare was thinking and what he intended to do. And so they gave themselves over to a friendly chat. The Orsini did likewise, and the talk turned inexorably to what had been discussed in Cesare’s chamber the night before: the question of how Louis of France was likely to react if Cesare moved against Florence. The Orsini spoke carefully, obliquely. Acknowledging that the king was unlikely ever to explicitly withdraw his promise to protect Florence—by doing so he would make himself look dishonorable and weak—they nevertheless gave the visitors to understand that Louis was willing to advance southward out of Milan slowly enough to give Cesare time to do as he wished without interference. Preparations for an offensive against Florence, they suggested, were already under way. They spoke of how fast Cesare was capable of moving—meaning how little time he would need.
Much of this was the opposite of the truth. Machiavelli was right in surmising that Louis would never let Cesare, or anyone else, seize control of Florence and Tuscany. On that very morning, though no one in Urbino had any way of knowing it, part of the king’s army was departing Milan with two related assignments: to see to it that Florence was left alone, and to force Vitelli and Baglioni out of Tuscany. Ignorant though he was of these developments, Machiavelli must have seen through the Orsinis’ pose. He knew Paolo’s reputation—knew that, though capable of talking tough, he was an unstable character, so unsteady under pressure that his own troops called him “Madonna” Orsini and not because of any maternal concern for their well-being. And that Giulio, though a more impressive fighting man than his cousin—the Borgias would learn to their cost just how relentless a foe he could be—had a reputation for deviousness second only to that of his brother, the fork-tongued Cardinal Giovanni Battista Orsini. Machiavelli and the bishop would have suspected from the start that this encounter was no accident, and that Cesare had instructed the cousins in what to say in order to frighten the signori of Florence and prompt them to come to terms.
That night, hours after sundown, Soderini and Machiavelli were escorted back to the ducal palace to meet again with Cesare. This eccentric scheduling, if partly tactical on Cesare’s part, was also a reflection of his youth: he still had a young man’s inclination, which he indulged with an insouciance that could infuriate even the pope, to stay up all night and sleep the morning away. This time, his visitors soon saw, there were to be no more amusing preliminaries, no verbal sparring, no subtleties to be interpreted at leisure. Cesare began where he had ended the night before, with an ultimatum. Florence had to decide whether it was with him or against him. And now there was a deadline: he would give the signoria four days to reach its decision and not an hour more. If he had received no answer after four days, Cesare would, as he vaguely but ominously put it, act in accord with his own interests. His insistence that everything be settled quickly seemed to Machiavelli a confirmation of his suspi
cions. The duke, he felt sure, hoped to be able to present Louis of France with a fait accompli in which king, republic, and Borgias were all allies but Florence was in a distinctly submissive role.
Soderini and Machiavelli spent the rest of the night drafting a report that, immediately upon completion, they handed to a mounted courier for delivery to Florence with all possible speed. A few hours later, after snatching a bit of sleep, Machiavelli too set out on the seventy-mile ride home. He and the bishop had agreed that one of them had better return home to explain some of the subtleties barely touched on in their report. Soderini, as senior member of the delegation, would remain in Urbino, doing what he could to keep Cesare’s impatience under control while being careful to promise him nothing.
Ironically, the whole drama came to nothing. The Florentine authorities, benefiting from Machiavelli’s account of what he had witnessed in Urbino and his interpretation of the situation, found excuses to delay their response. They sent word back to Cesare that, eager though they were to cooperate, it seemed advisable to commit to nothing until the pope and King Louis had been consulted. This was so unanswerable, so impossible to object to, that it sent Cesare into a white-hot rage and Soderini racing out of Urbino in fear for his life. When French couriers reached Cesare with orders not to disturb Florence but instead to dislodge Vitelli and Baglioni from Arezzo, the game was up, his bluff called.