Even during the youth of Vannozza's four children there was considerable doubt as to who was the eldest, doubt as to whether all were siblings. Their father himself deliberately compounded the doubt and obscurity as, foxlike, he doubled and redoubled upon his tracks to protect his young. The most extraordinary example of this occurred when Borgia, as pope, sought to legitimize Cesare in order to give him a cardinal's hat. Two statements were prepared regarding the boy's paternity: one was secret, the other was published, and they contradicted each other at every vital point. Cesare himself very clearly harbored a bitter grievance about his place in the family, but what exactly that grievance was, none outside Borgia family councils ever knew.
Cesare, the eldest, was barely eight years old and the youngest, Joffre, was still a baby when their father added yet another inexplicable twist to the family mystery. He took the four children away from their mother Vannozza and placed them under the guardianship of his cousin, Adriana da Mila. His relationship with Vannozza remained friendly; she continued to flourish financially under his protection; she was permitted frequent contact with her children. But from January 1483 she ceased, for all practical purposes, to be their mother. That role was now filled by Madonna Adriana, that most shadowy, most enigmatic of the Borgia figures—unimportant in herself, devoted to her cousin, and yet the person who brushed in the first lurid colors of the infamy that would cling to Rodrigo's name. It was through Adriana that his love life, deplorable but commonplace enough, was transformed into a tale that might have been told by Ovid or Boccaccio.
Adriana was born in Rome—her father had come to Italy in the first wave of Catalans under old Calixtus—and had married a minor member of the Orsini clan by whom she had a single child, a son, before being widowed. She was some ten years younger than the magnificent cousin whom she hero-worshiped, and she and her son Orsino Orsini came under Rodrigo's protection after she was widowed—an anomaly in itself, for custom dictated that her natural protector should be the head of her husband's clan. There occurred, however, an even more anomalous, a final and inextricable tangling of the bizarre Borgia family relationship. In May 1489 Orsino Orsini was married, in the Star Chamber of the Borgia palace, to the sixteen-year-old Giulia Farnese, a girl of astonishing beauty but small dowry, from an unimportant family. Before or shortly after the marriage ceremony, her new husband slipped into the marital background and the fifty-eight-year-old Cardinal Borgia took his place.
There were many and growing indications of Borgia's power in Rome but none were so unequivocal as this. Under normal circumstances the debauchment of a young noblewoman would have been followed swiftly by the avenging daggers of her own or her husband's kin. But now those concerned kept quiet—the Orsini because they feared, the Farnese because they hoped. The Farnese certainly received their reward in due course. Borgia's first act on ascending the papal throne was to make a cardinal of Giulia's brother, starting him on the path to the throne itself and making the family's fortunes. To Adriana the act itself was its own reward for her cousin Rodrigo was her universe. No one knew for certain whether she acted the part of conscious bawd, organizing the marriage as a means of putting the teenaged girl into her aging cousin's bed, or whether Adriana merely acquiesced in the grotesque arrangement. But her role as Giulia's mother-in-law provided the cloak of legality and respectability which Borgia always insisted on throwing over his actions. Giulia shared the same house with Adriana and the children of Vannozza, while her young husband Orsino withdrew wanly to his family's country estate.
In exchanging the mature love of thirty-eight for the fresh love of sixteen, Borgia entered upon a second young- manhood. He was extravagantly happy, doting upon the voluptuous, beautiful child like a youth in his first love affair, restless and querulous should she be absent from Rome even overnight, bubbling with joy when she returned. It speaks much for Giulia's generous if somewhat shallow nature that she made little attempt to profit financially from Borgia's infatuation. Her family used her unashamedly, and her lover acceded to everything demanded of him. But Giulia, personally, was content to accept the trappings due a great man's mistress: the delight in taking precedence over those who had been her equals or even her superiors; the heady pleasure of granting or refusing patronage; the casual, endless gifts of jewels and rich dress. Meanwhile, Borgia paid for his new lease on life with bitter sexual jealousy.
It was not so much that Giulia delighted in testing her power over a man who wielded power over others. Admittedly, she was quite different from Vannozza and in a manner that was not simply due to the great difference in their ages. Where Vannozza had been dedicated both to her own financial interest and her lover's well-being, Giulia was lighthearted and featherbrained, never looking beyond the delights of today. And where Vannozza sought to tie her lover to her by submission and acquiescence, Giulia displayed an independence of spirit which kept Borgia's interest at fever pitch even while such spirit could enrage him.
But after all, it was her very difference from Vannozza which had attracted him in the first place. There was, indeed, only one real flaw in Giulia's and Borgia's relationship and that was the existence of her husband. Unexpectedly, Orsino Orsini declined to stay discreetly in the background, as Vannozza's husbands had done. His protests were feeble enough, for he was a weak, spiritless man, and when at last he was goaded to action, his cuckolder had succeeded to the papal throne, thus adding the crushing power of the Keys to Borgia's already immense advantages. But the ever-generous Giulia seems to have become disturbed by her husband's pitiful pipings from the family estate at Bassanello and would defy Borgia from time to time, journeying to Bassanello to spend a few uneasy days with Orsino. She continued to do so even after Borgia became pope, earning now full papal thunders against her impious conduct. "Thankless and teacherous Giulia," Borgia spluttered in the autumn of 1494,
We have heard that you have again refused to return to us without Orsino's consent. We know the evil of your soul and of the man who guides you but we would not for one moment have thought it possible for you to break your solemn oath not to go near Orsino. But you have done so, risking your very life in order to go to Bassanello so that you could surrender yourself once more to that stallion. We herewith ordain, under pain of excommunication and eternal damnation, that you shall not go to Bassanello.12
Even the faithful Adriana was upbraided and reproached for her supposed part in Giulia's obstinacy. Where the affair might have ended, with a raging lover seemingly prepared to excommunicate and damn eternally all who stood between him and his desire, was anybody's guess. But the intriguing question as to whether a wife could be excommunicated even by a pope for obeying her marriage vows remained speculative. Orsino Orsini backed away from the storm and returned his wife to her lover. Nevertheless, Giulia's warmth of heart enabled her to add yet another puzzle to the growing Borgia legend. The calumnious whispered that her only child, Laura, was in fact the perfectly legitimate offspring of the Orsini marriage.
In the opinion of most Romans, Cardinal Borgia's tangled domestic life was strictly his own affair. Far greater interest was displayed in the relatives of Pope Sixtus himself, for so greatly had the papal court changed in these last few years that the Riario clan appeared like some royal family to be studied minutely and assiduously courted by those with a decent care for their ambitions. Piero Riario's death had altered the direction, not the force, of Sixtus's anxious love so that it was now Piero's brother Girolamo who had first call on that love and the treasury behind it. But there was a third nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, who profited from Piero's death, though indirectly.
Sixtus had made Giuliano della Rovere a cardinal. That was the least any pope could do for a nephew, but thereafter, despite the fact that he bore the same family name as the pope, della Rovere remained in the background while his far less talented cousins were dizzily elevated. The gossips nodded knowingly: did this not give substance to the rumors that the Riario brothers were rather closer relatives of the pope t
han was publicly acknowledged? A massive, handsome, taciturn man, della Rovere seemed, to those who knew him, to be clamping down on an explosive energy. Bitterly jealous though he must have been of his cousin, Cardinal Piero Riario, yet he bided his time. Piero's death was his opportunity, for Giuliano, too, was a cardinal and so the only one of the family to fill the vacant place. Reluctantly, Sixtus brought him into the foreground. But he still remained in a subordinate position in the papal as well as the family councils. Compared with him, Rodrigo Borgia was a dazzling figure, moving effortlessly in the upper circles of power. Nevertheless, when Sixtus died suddenly in 1484 it was as though the long-suppressed energies of Giuliano della Rovere now served to propel him forward irresistibly toward the highest levels of power. It was he who now delivered the first real check to Rodrigo Borgia's advance, sounding the challenge notes of a feud that would continue for the rest of Borgia's life and end only when della Rovere, mounting the throne as Pope Julius II, utterly destroyed all that Borgia had created.
An outbreak of violence was as much a part of a pope's obsequies in Rome as was the chanting of the Mass for the Dead. Sixtus was probably still alive clinically when his body, clad in nothing but a threadbare shift, was pushed to one side and virtually forgotten during the following forty- eight hours while the Romans went about the traditional business of attacking the papal favorites. Rodrigo Borgia's fine new palace now became wholly a fortress, with its great door stoutly barricaded and cannon poking out of the embrasures to threaten the square and street below. Others followed his prudent example, for although it was the Riario family which was the prime target for the popular rage, a Roman mob rarely troubled to differentiate between victims. The Riario palace had already fallen to that mob. "We saw a great throng of people around the Count's house," the Florentine ambassador Vespucci wrote to his principals, giving a vivid eyewitness account of the rapacity of a Roman sacking. "The doors and windows were carried off and a large part of the window railings. The trees and plants in the garden were uprooted and a marble fountain in the garden, the lead in the conduit, the partition in the stable and the racks and mangers taken away. Chimneys were cut down and thrown from the windows, even a piece of the gilded rose in the ceiling was hacked out and still they did not cease to destroy and take away until they came to the hinges and nails of the house."13 Girolamo Riario was away fighting in the North, but his wife Caterina— despite her seven months' pregnancy—mounted on horseback and with only a small bodyguard, tempestuously galloped through Rome to seize Castel Sant'Angelo, military key to the city.
On the following day, August 14, the Florentine ambassador wrote privately to Lorenzo de' Medici saying that Riario had arrived in Rome. "His Excellency is very bold and says that he will remain until the new pontiff is elected. His boldness is founded upon the papal army and the Orsini faction and upon having Castel Sant' Angelo and, he imagines, having some of the cardinals in his favor—among them the Vice-Chancellor, but I do not know how it will turn out." Writing to the Signoria, the Florentine government itself, he emphasized that Riario depended upon Borgia's support, "But I do not know how much trust can be put in the latter except insofar as his cause is the Count's. There are two leaders here at present, the Vice-Chancellor and della Rovere."14
Vespucci was correct in saying that Borgia's support of Girolamo Riario was merely incidental: he had no intention of advancing any other candidacy but his own at this, the fourth conclave of his career. He was still comparatively young, at the age of fifty-four, for an office whose holder usually entered upon it in his late sixties. Nevertheless, Borgia was approaching a critical age, for another pontificate as long as the last would see him an old man at the close. He was prepared now as he had never been before, the accumulated experience and wealth and influence of nearly thirty years of high office were directed, at this moment, to one supreme end. Most observers rated his chances high, agreeing among themselves that he possessed fully the intangible qualities which made a man papabile. The ambassador from Ferrara was in a minority with his colder appraisal. "The Vice-Chancellor is exerting himself to the utmost, but at the moment it is not possible to give a firm opinion of his chances. One must also remember that proverb that he who enters a conclave a pope, leaves it a cardinal."15
The proverb proved correct. Despite Borgia's standing, despite the energy he derived from the knowledge of time's passing, he could not yet withstand the crosscurrents of Italian peninsula politics that swept through the College of Cardinals. Again, he paid the penalty for the fact that he was isolated in Italy, without natural allies. He abandoned his own candidacy in an attempt to place an aging fellow-countryman, Cardinal Moles, upon the throne. That, too, failed and at last he was forced to compromise with Giuliano della Rovere and support della Rovere's own candidate, the Genoese Battista Cibo. For once, Borgia miscalculated, ignoring or underestimating the fact that Cibo was wholly under the control of his fellow citizen della Rovere. "Cibo has not much experience in state affairs, nor much learning, though he is by no means illiterate," Vespucci informed Lorenzo de' Medici. "He was altogether in the hands of della Rovere, and it was he who secured him the cardinal's hat. Della Rovere may now be said to be pope, and will have more power than he had with Pope Sixtus if he knows how to hold his ground."16
Giuliano della Rovere was perfectly capable of holding his ground and from then onward he loomed ever larger on Borgia's horizon. Nevertheless, the nature of the new pontificate was such that only a very weak or very scrupulous man could have failed to profit from a collapsing system. The papal court was now, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from an ordinary monarchy, for Innocent VIII, as Cibo styled himself, broke with the discreet tradition of the papal "nephew" and openly acknowledged his children, a son and a daughter. They were sumptuously installed in the Vatican and there flattered and treated in the manner of royalty. Previous pontiffs might have been as besotted with their relatives, but each had been, in addition, preoccupied with some major enterprise, whether it was crusade in the East or dynastic war in Italy. In consequence some form of discipline had been imposed by necessity upon the Curia. Innocent, a sick man who spent days in a semi-torpor, virtually abdicated responsibility, apart from a disastrous interference in the Kingdom of Naples. The unguarded riches of the Church, whether riches of specie or of office, fell to those who had a nerve to plunder. During the eight-year pontificate Rodrigo Borgia took his share and more, thrusting forward neck and neck with della Rovere toward the penultimate position. In the last few months of the pontificate della Rovere miscalculated in his turn, displaying naked ambition to a suddenly frightened College, so that when Innocent exchanged his normal lassitude for death, Borgia took the final step with ease.
3 The Papal Monarch
In the early hours of the morning of August 11, 1492, a window on the first floor of the Vatican Palace was opened and a figure, indistinguishable in the dusk, emerged and peered out at the handful of people below. There was an anticipatory stir and then, in the hush of dawn, the figure raised his voice in the haunting chant which marked the end of yet another conclave. "Habemus papam," the chant rose and fell, dying away, to be echoed by the response in the same key, "Deo gratias." The response was thin for there were few people in the square so early in the morning. The conclave had already lasted four days and nights, and there had been no indication that it would so suddenly be brought to an end. The watchers awaited the name of the new successor of St. Peter; it came, but not only in the traditional chanted form. Another figure appeared at the window and hurled something into the air—a bundle of small slips of paper which separated and fell softly, slowly through the windless darkness. Those nearest picked them up, peering at the hastily scribbled, barely visible writing. "We have for pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia of Valencia."
Inside the palace the author of the message was struggling into the largest of the three sizes of papal robes which, by custom, had been prepared in readiness for this moment. After thirty-seven years
the apprentice had emerged as master and he was shaking, trembling with excitement and joy. He had shown none of the traditional reluctance in accepting the awesome burden, and there had been none of the lengthy debates regarding the choice of a pontifical style. In place of the sober "Volo" of acceptance he cried out, like a child unexpectedly gaining a long- awaited desire, "I am pope! I am pope!" Immediately he announced that sonorous papal style of "Alexander" and instructed the master of ceremonies to prepare the little slips of paper which would circulate through Rome, the first tiny break with convention. Shortly afterward Alexander displayed himself to the crowd which suddenly gathered, beaming, laughing with undisguised joy, making his graceful, sweeping benediction to the city and to the world. The crowd eventually dispersed, the cardinals went back to their palaces, the curial machinery began to pick up the rhythm of a new pontificate—and the rumors started.
The rumors grew steadily over the following years. They were based on sophisticated truths, expanded half- truths and hairbreadth legalism. They were the result of honest indignation, of devious opportunism and of outright hatred. They were summed up and expressed at last in that bitter epigram which winged its way around Rome. "Alexander sells the keys, the altar, Christ Himself. He has a right to, for he bought them." Years later when the man himself was dead and all that he had worked for had crumbled and disappeared, the Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini set down, in his precise and luminous prose, a classic syllogism which sought to account for the curious nature of the Borgia pontificate. "As his accession to the papacy was foul and shameful—for he bought with gold so high an office—so similarly his government was in agreement with its vile foundations."17 Guicciardini towered above all other Italian historians, for his work was the first truly national history yet devised in his fragmented nation, a history that placed in broad and majestic perspective the fantastically complex pattern of Italian events. His judgments achieved the status of historical truth, no matter how partisan their ultimate foundation, for there was no historian of equal stature to oppose them. In this matter he, Italy's historian, had spoken with finality and there was nothing left for posterity to do but reframe the charge, in more or less emotional language, that in the Conclave of 1492 Rodrigo Borgia had committed a unique crime whence all else flowed.
The Fall of the House of Borgia Page 6