The Fall of the House of Borgia

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The Fall of the House of Borgia Page 4

by E R Chamberlin


  That was precisely what impressed the Romans: They liked life the way they liked their food—highly spiced, rich, unsubtle—and the foreign Rodrigo Borgia more clearly divined, more faithfully reflected, the nature of that anonymous Roman populace than many a native Roman. At every major public festival the exterior of his house was decorated like a theater; free wine was in abundance and the square outside became a major attraction for the idle, the curious and the thirsty. At one time or another one could see splendid, if obscure, allegories performed here with kings and angels and demons jostling and weaving amid a rain of fireworks. Here were jousts and fights with animals —even, on one occasion, a lion. When Granada fell to his compatriots, the cardinal from Spain proudly put on a peculiarly Spanish performance—a bullfight. The beast killed two members of the crowd and badly injured others before it was despatched, but that, in the eyes of the Romans merely added to the excitement. On special occasions vast, immensely heavy tubes of bronze, richly chased and decorated, were set up in that square for the Romans to wonder at. Tubes like these had yet to be turned against the walls of Rome. Cannon were a delightful novelty, and when the cardinal's Spanish gunners touched off the blank charges the Romans merely shivered deliciously at the appalling bellow, regarding it as just another larger and noisier firework. They had yet to experience the helpless terror as giant stone cannonballs crashed from a hostile heaven.

  All together, the square before Cardinal Borgia's palace took over in miniature the role which the ruined Colosseum had once performed, providing ever-changing entertainment for people who seemed incapable of making their own. These inhabitants of the filthy warrens of the city had no vote in the Sacred College, possessed no overt political right of any value whatever—but in their mass they were the Roman people, and he who had the sympathy of the people, even a purchased sympathy, had added significantly to those imponderable values which might, eventually, place the tiara on his head.

  Pius died; Barbo ascended the throne; Borgia was confirmed for the second time in his high office. Pietro Barbo was a personal friend of Borgia's but he was no man's fool and certainly would not have allowed friendship to overcome judgment in a matter which vitally affected his well-being as Pope Paul II. He, like Calixtus and Pius before him, like Sixtus and Innocent after him, discerned the core of solid competence behind Borgia's jovial front.

  Over a period of thirty-seven years, five popes in turn provided a solid rung for his advancement, five men whose characters covered almost the whole spectrum of human personality but who shared a dominant characteristic. Each was a veteran fighter in the political battles of Italy who very rapidly would have discarded a useless political tool, particularly an inherited one. Each automatically adopted the Spanish cardinal, the sincerest testimony to his abilities. Years later, when he at last broke through the barrier and emerged as pope his secretary summed up the cause and effect of that long apprenticeship.

  It is now thirty-seven years since his uncle Calixtus III made him a cardinal and during that time he never once missed a Consistory except when prevented by illness, and that was most rare. Throughout the reigns of Pius II, Paul II, Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII he was at the center of affairs so that few understood etiquette as he did. He knew how to dominate, how to shine in conversation, how to appear dignified for, majestic in stature, he had the advantage of other men.7

  His foreignness, his isolated position in Rome sufficiently accounted for the fact that he was passed over for the supreme office when his youth no longer disqualified him, but that very isolation rendered him simultaneously tough and supple. He survived, and advanced, without the dynastic or even the civic support that his Italian colleagues enjoyed.

  It was under Sixtus, who had small personal liking for him, that he undertook a major mission that both brought him to a wider audience and allowed him to strengthen his own distant base. The mission was to Spain and its ostensible purpose was to persuade the Spaniards to turn from their private war and join a major Crusade in the East. In reality, he was ordered to take part in some very delicate negotiations between the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, whose outcome would immediately affect all Spain and ultimately all Europe. The Castilians had been engaged in a lengthy and unsavory debate regarding the legitimacy of their monarch's daughter and heiress. The fact that King Enriquez of Castile bore the opprobious nickname of "the Impotent" gave substance to his subjects' suspicions and increased his resentment of his sister Isabella, who was not only legitimate but attractive, highly intelligent, and popular. In addition, she had had the audacity to marry Ferdinand, the eighteen-year-old heir to the throne of Aragon, in direct opposition to her brother's wishes. The marriage had taken place under utmost difficulties, in circumstances charged with a romance that writers of ballads would exploit for decades—the handsome young man gallantly making his way in disguise through hostile country, in danger of arrest by the king's men; his bride's astonishment and unfeigned joy at his arrival; their poverty, which forced them to borrow money for the ceremony—all this was common knowledge. But what long remained a secret was that the papal bull of dispensation, which enabled them to marry though they were cousins, was a forgery—almost certainly Isabella didn't know it.

  Rodrigo Borgia carried with him a genuine bull of dispensation, but it was left entirely to his discretion whether it should be published—or quietly destroyed. If destroyed, the young couple would stand convicted of technical incest, their marriage automatically under the ban of the Church. If published, it would not merely give the papal blessing to a couple who were, as it happened, much in love, but it would also prepare the ground for the union of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, making in effect one great kingdom of Spain with all the incalculable effects upon the balance of Europe such a union involved. And finally, it would implicitly brand King Enrique's heiress as bastard. All together, the immense discretionary power thus given to the vice-chancellor was evidence enough of his standing among the diplomats of the Curia.

  Rodrigo Borgia left Rome as the vice-chancellor of the Roman Church, bound on a mission of great political importance. But he was also a member of a minor Spanish nobility, returning now to his native land for the first time since he had left it as an inexperienced youth. Happily, personal vanity coincided with diplomatic protocol, and he dipped heavily into his accumulated wealth to furnish his Spanish mission with a magnificence almost vulgar, creating another species of theatrical show that Spain remembered for a long time afterward. He was not disappointed in his reception. There were those who recorded privately their contempt of the softened, italianate Spaniard, but in public he was feted as visiting royalty. Valencia, the titular city of his bishopric, exerted itself to honor its splendid son who could now do so much for it: Crimson draperies were hung over the great city gates; a royal canopy was borne over him to shield him from the rays of the June sun; and, splendid on his great white horse he rode into the city of his youth to receive the plaudits of the crowds and the speeches of the welcoming committee of nobles. He remained in Valencia for more than a month, returning lavish entertainment with lavish entertainment, surpassing the expectations of even those who had heard from a distance of the Borgia fortune. So impressive was the show that crowds of young Valencian nobles determined to attach themselves to his train when it returned to Italy.

  He left the beautiful sea-cooled city in the gasping heat of a Spanish August, riding inland to begin the work for which he had come—and succeeding to a degree greater than perhaps even he had expected. His first task was to assess the potentials of Ferdinand and Isabella. The gap between the young prince and the prelate was great: Rodrigo was in his forty-second year, a portly, impressive figure exuding the self-confidence born both of his worldly experience and the power of his great office. Ferdinand was just twenty, a fair-haired lively youth, quick of intelligence but with a certain shallowness. Isabella, a year older than Ferdinand, seemed considerably more mature, physically attractive enough to be accounted beautiful w
ithout obvious flattery but possessed, too, of a genuine intellect that, despite her youth, enabled her to judge the man who was judging her. Out of that brief contact the couple who were to be known as Their Catholic Majesties and the later Pope Alexander VI cemented a political and personal bond that was to endure until Alexander's son shattered it. Isabella never wholly trusted Rodrigo, but mindful of that careful balance she had established with her husband, she followed his lead in this matter.

  They received their dispensation, but there still remained the matter of ensuring that Isabella's brother, in rage or pique, would not ally himself with the thronging enemies of the Holy See. And here Cardinal Borgia's prime talent was employed with brilliant effect. The bitterest of enemies could not help conceding that his eloquence was extraordinary. The very fact that it was devoid of fashionable literary qualities enhanced its value even though it earned him the contempt of humanist scholars in Italy. Speaking in the Spanish that even in Italy, was never far from his lips, he urged the young couple's case so forcefully to the king's advisers that Enrique agreed to a formal reconciliation. Isabella traveled to her brother's court at Segovia and there, at a great public banquet, Borgia was able to witness the consummation of his Spanish mission.

  He left Spain in September 1474, having spent some fourteen months in the country. Much of that time seems to have been spent in solid political work as the representative of a supranational power in a country on the brink of momentous change. His mission earned goodwill for the papacy, even while it enabled Rodrigo to lay the foundations for the development of the Borgia power and wealth in his native country—foundations which were to act as buttress for the far more important task of establishing the Borgia in Italy.

  2 The Path to the Throne

  Rome had changed during the short time Borgia had been absent. It seemed, indeed, as though it were trying to repair in a decade the neglect of centuries, so ruthless, so frantic was the speed with which it was renewing its physical and social parts. The energy of the papacy, so long diffused, was now singlemindedly directed toward the enormous task of reconstruction, channeled through the iron will of Sixtus IV, a man who had fought his way unaided to the top. Edict after edict poured from him, affecting every aspect of the city's life. It was he who gave Rome its most precious gift, one almost unique in Italian cities—an abundant supply of cold, clear water. There had been more than a thousand fountains in the days of the Caesars and, choked by neglect though they were, their elaborate conduits were still in existence awaiting only a water supply and an army of men to clean them. Both were provided and even in the most squalid courts, water flowed again, splashing joyously from ancient conduits into modern basins. A much-needed new bridge was thrown across the Tiber; the Cloaca Maxima and its complex sewage system was restored; wide and handsome new roads pierced the tangled squalor of centuries. Its lungs and arteries cleared, Rome began to stir from its centuries-long sleep.

  The monuments of the imperial city formed somber islands of haunted decay, diminishing in size as their brick and marble and tile were removed for the new buildings; but they seemed indestructible, on so titanic a scale had they been built. In between the shattered baths and temples of the Caesars, between the collapsing porticoes and weed-grown forums new life sprouted urgently upward. Money was pouring into the city: the cautious bankers of Venice and Genoa and Florence first settled in rented accommodations and then confidently built their own palaces on the handsome new Via Papalis, sure evidence of social stability. Sixtus granted outright ownership to those who built, and houses now pressed close to Cardinal Borgia's palace, where before there had been only trampled earth. That palace was now only one of many and no longer particularly conspicuous in its size, for his fellow cardinals, taking courage from the pope's own confidence and energy, threw themselves into the frenzy of building. They even crossed to the unfashionable right bank in their search for sites. Domenico della Rovere, one of the pope's nephews, tore down a mass of squalid buildings in front of St. Peter's and erected an enormous palace in a fantastically short space of time; another nephew, Piero Riario, migrated to the Janiculum and built himself a beautiful villa where Nero once had a pleasure garden sweeping down to the river. But it was in the triangular plain on the left bank immediately opposite the Vatican where building was concentrated. Here arose the palaces of the new princes of Rome. Stafano Nardini was the last to build in the old, massive fortress style—barely a stone's throw from Borgia's own palace-fort. Piero Riario, trusting in the power of his uncle the pope, opted for a more elegant building, a house rather than a castle, complete with beautiful gardens closer to the river. Estouteville took over an existing palace not far from the Piazza Navona, the ancient stadium that was now Rome's principal marketplace, and used his enormous wealth to make of it a showplace to challenge any other in Europe.

  Against this background of splendid new buildings the people themselves were changing in habits and appearance. In the lowest stratum of society there was little to mark a new age. They lived as they had always lived—in windowless burrows scraped out of the ancient ruins or formed by heaping stones together. They ate what they had always eaten—pasta, two or three varieties of vegetables flavored with strong herbs, washed down with harsh wine. Their diet was, if anything, reduced by the new health regulations which drastically limited the number of pigs and chickens that once roamed the city. Their clothes remained the same coarse, sack-like garments; their morality, based on a widespread but close-knit family grouping, remained unchanged; religious faith was still a dominant factor in their lives. But in the strata above them, among the new rich and the ancient nobility, the quality and appearance of life altered.

  The old still clung to the sober robes that marked both class and profession; the young strutted forth in a peacock blaze of color. Velvet and brocade, silk and damask became everyday materials, with emeralds and rubies, pearls, sapphires, and diamonds worked into the fabric to proclaim a man's status in a gaudy show of wealth. In their palaces, the old rough-and-ready service tendered by loyal but unsophisticated servants began to give way to specialization and then to a more precise division of labor with a corresponding increase in the number of servants.

  Even a private household would reckon on providing wages and meals for at least a hundred people and probably some two hundred men wore Borgia's livery of yellow and red. These were just his household servants, totally distinct from his ecclesiastical staff. Borgia remained indifferent to food throughout his life; even as pope his meals were so frugal that people disliked dining privately with him. But he nevertheless had a position to uphold and there was accordingly a large staff to carry out the complex ritual of a Renaissance meal—a master of the table, with assistants, a chief carver with more assistants, some fifteen waiting men, a butler of the pantry with an assistant, and a butler of the wines. Behind the scenes there were yet more servants exclusively devoted to the table, each with his specialization and many with assistants—marketer, store-keeper, cellarer, water carrier, as well as the cooks themselves. Throughout the great palace were other, virtually autonomous departments, the master of each jealously guarding his prerogatives, enjoying greater power and prestige the closer his duties brought him to the person of the cardinal.

  Each department had its quota of slaves, male and female, adult and juvenile, engaged for the most part on dirty rough work, although an alert and attractive youth could hope to work his way up even as far as the great audience chamber. Slavery, which had almost disappeared from Italy, had returned on the wave of prosperity: twenty thousand men, women and children passed through the slave market in Venice alone each year. So plentiful was the supply that even small merchants could buy a human animal to help out in the home while the nobility came more and more to rely upon them in place of expensive and arrogant servants. Prices varied immensely so that the lady of the house could expect to pay only six ducats for a hard-working but ill-favored woman while the pretty young girl who would probably grace her h
usband's bed would cost anything up to a hundred. The purchaser had the choice of a half dozen races, white as well as black, Christian as well as pagan or Moslem. "Tartars are hardiest and best for work. Russians are built on finer lines but, in my opinion, Tartars are best. Circassians are a superior breed wherefore everybody seeks them,"

  8

  a Roman lady noted. They were, on the whole, well treated. In some cities, notably Florence, the children of slaves automatically became free citizens. Romans declined such an expensive sop to conscience but a slave in a household such as Cardinal Borgia's could expect a life far more attractive than that of the average peasant farmer.

  In most princely houses there would have been virtually a separate establishment for the Letterati, the learned men who, while living at their patron's expense, could "converse in the four principal languages of the world, namely Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Italian" and as a by-product earn fame for that patron. Borgia had little personal interest in such garnishes; nevertheless he was sufficiently a man of his time to realize the propaganda value of humanist scholars. The head of his household was a

  German, Lorenz Behaim, one of the leading members of the new Roman academy. His secretary was a Cypriot, Ludovico Podocatharo, who brought to the household the glamor of Greek learning and the skills of Greek intrigue. His legal adviser and notary was a Roman, Camillo Beneimbene, who probably knew more secrets of the great families of Rome than the entire Curia put together. There was good employment for many lesser men—secretaries, lawyers, accountants—who could turn Borgia's letters into elegant prose and keep track of his ever-growing possessions, but none of them were of sufficient stature to attract scholars and so transform Borgia's chancery into an academy.

 

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