Alfonso's wife and sister were equally in no doubt that the threat came from inside. From the moment Alfonso was established in a chamber in the Borgia tower, one or the other of the women was permanently at his bedside. They superintended the cooking and serving of his meals personally and watched while a procession of physicians came to Alfonso's bed. Protocol demanded that Cesare should visit, but the women doubled their vigilance while he was in the room. The visit passed without incident, although one of the many observers there heard Cesare mutter something to the effect that what was not achieved at breakfast would be completed at supper. Alexander continued to display the utmost anxiety about Alfonso, solicitously inquiring about his condition, sending him delicacies from his own table, sparing neither trouble nor expense in providing doctors—and guards. But gnawing at him constantly was his knowledge of the identity of the instigator. Cappello tried to pin him down on the fact; volubly, Alexander asserted his belief in Cesare's innocence and then, wearily it seemed, stated that if Cesare had indeed attacked Alfonso, then Alfonso must have brought it on himself.
So matters progressed throughout July. Gradually, Alfonso improved. With Lucrezia he decided that, as soon as he was well enough to travel, he would leave this deathtrap of a palace and return to his father's kingdom, Lucrezia joining him later on. On one occasion, taking the fresh air at the window, he caught sight of Cesare walking in the Vatican garden and shot at him with a crossbow. Or so Cesare said, though it is difficult to imagine how an invalid could find a crossbow in a sickroom or have the strength to wield it. Few were interested enough to ponder the problem; the affair was already subsiding in importance with even Alexander displaying impatience. It was, it seemed, no longer a potential tragedy but merely a scandal, and scandals were commonplace. Then on August 18 Sancia and Lucrezia made a mistake. They allowed themselves to be lured from Alfonso's room, leaving him alone for the first time since the attack. When they returned he was dead —strangled.
What exactly happened during the five minutes or so that Lucrezia and Sancia were absent from the room—and how they came to abandon Alfonso—was the subject of so much contradictory speculation that it seemed as though the murder of the duke of Bisceglie was to be as profound a mystery as the murder of the duke of Gandia. Cappello insisted that Cesare personally did the deed after forcing his way into the room and ordering the women to leave. But Cesare throughout had remained in the background, deliberately working through others. Burchard, normally lucid if laconic, decided upon a discretion so absolute that his testimony was useless. He noted that the dead man's physicians were questioned "but were released since the man who entrusted them with the commission went unpunished—and he was well known." Burchard must have known that Alfonso had been strangled and not poisoned, and no learned physicians were needed to diagnose the cause of Alfonso's livid, swollen face and the terrible marks around the throat.
But there was one man very close to the situation and reasonably unbiased who was determined that the truth should be known, if only privately. He was Raffaele Brandolini, a Florentine scholar and preacher who had been Alfonso's tutor and who lived now in Rome as a close friend of the family. It is unlikely that Lucrezia opened her heart to him, for she was too much of a Borgia to unveil family secrets even under these terrible circumstances. But Sancia was with Lucrezia throughout the final minutes of Alfonso's life, and it was she who told Brandolini what had happened.
Sancia's story was of the classic Italian plot, a wide- ranging, well-planned conspiracy which took every detail into account. On the morning of Alfonso's death a squad of Cesare's soldiers, under the command of his most trusted captain, Michelotto Corella, suddenly marched into the Apartments with the orders to arrest everybody on the grounds of the discovery of an anti-Borgia plot. The guards in and outside Alfonso's chamber were taken away, together with his two personal physicians. Lucrezia and Sancia protested vigorously. Michelotto apologized. He was only acting under orders, he claimed, but perhaps there had been some mistake. The best thing that the two women could do was to go to His Holiness and ask him to override Cesare's orders. Michelotto apparently put on such an apologetic air, as he might well have done before the daughter and daughter-in-law of the pope, that the two women seem to have been entirely deceived. Alexander was less than a minute's walk away in one of the adjoining chambers and, flustered but not really worried, Lucrezia and Sancia hastened to him. As soon as they had gone, Michelotto strangled the almost helpless Alfonso, and when the two women returned with Alexander's orders to free the prisoners, Michelotto woodenly informed them that Alfonso, duke of Bisceglie, had just died of an internal hemorrhage.
Sancia raged, screaming like a savage, tearing her hair and clothes, inveighing against all the Borgia. Lucrezia collapsed, crying silently for hour after hour so that her tears became one of the great legends of Rome. Alfonso was hurried into an obscure grave on that same evening, to the accompaniment only of religious rites and those of the barest minimum necessary, for Alexander, torn between love of his daughter and pride in his son, had chosen the passive way out. The whole affair was to be forgotten.
It is perhaps from this moment that Cesare achieved his final dominance over his father. Cappello, making his report, ended it with a curious phrase, seemingly contradictory but in fact remarkably perspicacious for this very imaginative ambassador. "The pope loves, and has great fear, of his son, the duke." The love Alexander bore for Cesare arose from family vanity; that he felt for Lucrezia was deeply personal. Although the murder of Alfonso of Bisceglie fitted in neatly enough with Alexander's overall plans, it is unlikely that he would willingly have inflicted on Lucrezia such an injury. But once done it was finished, the matter was hushed up and Lucrezia banished, with her tears and protests, to Nepi.
At the end of September, Cesare left Rome to continue his round of conquests and paused to visit Lucrezia. The murder of Alfonso had threatened a relationship which he valued, and he went to Nepi in order to state his side of the case. There had been rumors that Alfonso had intended an attack upon Cesare in order to forestall the attack upon himself, and Borgia apologists skillfully used the rumors as justification for the murder. In whatever manner Cesare argued his case, he succeeded. A few weeks later Lucrezia returned to Rome and happily resumed her old life, the tragedy forgotten and the breach in the Borgia family healed. Meanwhile, Cesare had embarked on that incredible series of campaigns which gave him a dukedom in a few weeks and established his name for all time.
11 The Prince
To the bystander's casual eye, the army which Cesare led from Rome in September 1500 differed little from the hundreds of such groups of armed men which were known to have entered or left the city over the past five hundred years. One's eye still went instinctively to the mounted men—noblemen for the most part, and thus able to afford a splendid show to enhance their already dominant position high on their giant horses. Clad in glittering steel from head to toe, wrapped around with the somber richness of velvet or brocade, their mounts decorated with gems or precious metal, they looked at once invulnerable and the natural lords of the earth. The foot soldiers came behind them, almost as an afterthought, bearing weapons whose design had changed little for perhaps a millennium. Only a professional would have noticed that the number of horsemen was rather smaller in proportion to the footsoldiers, and that the changes in the weapons of the
footmen, though superficially slight, were nevertheless curious. Again, there were fewer swordsmen than usual and rather more of those gangling Swiss with the ten-foot- long pikes. The professional's eye would have lighted speculatively upon those horsemen whose horses carried, in addition to the great long-sword, a clumsy contraption of wood and iron about five feet long, for which the term arquebus had recently been coined. He would have been even more interested in the giant versions of the same weapon, the bombards and the cannon, which lumbered along in the rear. But all these changes were only byproducts of the greatest evolution of all, one not discernible w
hile the army moved peaceably along its route. The force which Cesare Borgia had assembled to gain himself a principality was a machine aimed at killing and not, as in the past, an organization designed for blackmail.
It was the French who had brought blood back into Italian warfare. For over two hundred years, the endless "wars" between the Italian city-states had been fought by mercenaries. Most had been foreigners—English, German and Hungarian usually—and they had come to Italy to make money and not to defend or enforce some abstract cause. Grouping and regrouping solely in the name of profit, fighting with or against the same men, they had no incentive whatever to put their lives at unnecessary risk; and their wars resembled a game of chess rather than a bloody encounter. Machiavelli, the armchair strategist, scornfully noted a "battle" which dragged on for an entire day and ended with only one casualty—a mercenary who had fallen off his horse and was accidentally trampled in the mud.
The French invasion of 1494 had been politically inept, arousing the scornful mockery of the Italians. Militarily it shocked them profoundly. While they had been engaging in their mock battles, the French had been put to the ultimate test during their long running war with the English, and emerged victorious. When the French turned those war-polished arms against the Italians, the most sophisticated soldiers in Europe initially reacted like so many savages. The French reputation flashed ahead of them, paralyzing the Italians, so that in Naples, the garrison commander merely surrendered when the French artillery arrived. At Rapallo the defenders actually charged the guns, declaring that the noise frightened only cowards. The French use of artillery was dramatic, awe-inspiring; but just as revolutionary were the tactics of their infantry. In Italy the foot soldier was still despised—infantry was used only passively to break a cavalry charge. But the Swiss and German pikemen in the French army actually went over to the offensive, their dense squares—consisting of many thousands of men—keeping perfect formation as a result of endless drill. The Italians, for once, found themselves learning instead of teaching, but out of necessity they learned well and swiftly, and Cesare Borgia gained the fruit of that bitter lesson.
His bodyguard, some eight hundred strong, was composed exclusively of Spaniards. In part, the choice reflected his personal preference; for like his father, he remained wholly Spanish in outlook, dressing in the Spanish manner, speaking Spanish in preference to Italian, indulging in Spanish recreations. But the choice was also imposed upon him, for the Spaniards were about the most consummate soldiers in all Europe, much less Italy. Like the French they had learned in a hard school, in their case during the long battle with the Moors and, in the manner of soldiers, they had adopted their enemy's more efficient tactics. The Spaniards' cavalry, like the Moors', was lightly armored and incredibly agile. They were the first Christians to abandon the luxury of the heavily armored knight supported by five lightly armed, and expendable, followers. The great Spanish general Gonzalo de Cordoba adopted the Swiss tactics for infantry, supplying them with those deceptively simple pikes, ten feet long, which could create a moving hedge of bristling steel. Gonzalo did more: he was perhaps the first European to recognize the value of portable firearms, and now one Spaniard in six carried an arquebus and was skilled in its devastating use. Common to cavalry and infantry alike was their Spartan lifestyle. They had one main meal a day, eaten toward evening, and its ingredients were those which their ancestors had adopted from the very similar Roman soldiers: chopped onions, garlic, cucumber and chillis mixed with bread crumbs, olive oil and vinegar —a sustaining but pungent meal, which must have added considerably to the prevailing odor of unwashed bodies and reeking leather. Each man carried a leather winebag, containing perhaps half a gallon of harsh wine; and with these elementary requirements they could march or fight for days and weeks and continue long after more sophisticated soldiers would have collapsed from exhaustion.
Pikemen and swordsmen, arquebusiers and halberdiers, crossbowmen and cavalry—each had a part to play in the composite whole of an army, a part that had been brought to a kind of perfection during the long history of warfare. But Cesare's forthcoming campaign was unprecedented. In the past a commander might plan perhaps one major siege, if he had the time, but would base the rest of his campaign on a series of pitched battles. Cesare intended the capture of no less than ten walled cities in a small area and had no desire whatever to seek glory in the open field. His campaign was to be directed against cities, not men; against stone, not flesh. Once entry into a city had been gained, he would need infantry or cavalry to crush the remnants of resistance and thereafter to act as a police force. But before entry was effected their value was limited, a species of threat, no more. It was upon the terrible new weapon, artillery, that he relied for his new type of campaign.
Artillery struck the Italians with an apocalyptic force. It was a weapon invented by demons, not men, Guicciardini protested, and he was echoed by almost every writer. Before the French invasion it had been a clumsy, leisurely weapon. No field commander bothered to use it, and a commander engaged in a siege could never be certain whether it would arrive on time. If it did, the small balls of stone hardly affected the besieged, except for the flying splinters. With the advent of the French, the Italians saw gun carriages for the first time, ingenious contrivances which allowed the monsters to be manipulated with ease and speed. Italians saw especially bred horses drawing the guns at the speed of marching cavalry; even the lumbering ammunition wagons kept abreast of the army, for they were dragged by teams consisting of anything from ten to twenty horses. The Italians observed the effect of iron balls as big as a man's head flattening, not shattering, on impact, so that all the terrible released energy was directed immediately against the target. Above all, the Italians experienced for the first time in history the effect of massed artillery, for the compact army of the French dragged with them far more guns than had existed throughout Italy. The rolling thunder of mass bombardment was to be Cesare Borgia's leitmotif throughout his campaigns, a sound which men remembered long after they had forgotten the conventional details of slaughter.
During the bombardment of Imola, an observer living within the borders of the Florentine state heard it as a continual thunderstorm many miles away. Francesco Sperulo, the poet from Spoleto who wrote an immense epic poem in Latin praising Cesare Borgia, the new prince in Italy, lingered over the effect of artillery with a horrified fascination. The bellow of the explosion, that terrifying "bombard," provided an onomatopoetic name for the new monster with which the ancient Latin could just cope. In his verse the "horrendis machina bombis" appeared like some appalling natural force, with destruction falling out of heaven in the form of stone and iron, destroying the innocent and the guilty alike, rendering the coward and the brave man equal. The horror of being pulped to nothingness by an irresistible force unnerved the bravest men, providing Cesare with a potent weapon even before the fire was applied to the first cannon. Later in the campaign, Alexander gleefully described to the Venetian ambassador how the town of Ceri had surrendered without any fighting whatever. "Since Sunday to yesterday more than eight hundred balls had fallen on the city, throwing the soldiers into such fear that they declared their wish to surrender rather than be torn to pieces."
Cesare was fortunate in that, among the crowd of famous condottieri who had flocked to his banner, there was an artillery expert, Vitellozzo Vitelli. A pikeman or a halberdier could be trained in a few days or weeks at most but years of devoted study were needed to master artillery's thousand ramifications. A good artillery captain needed some of the qualifications of an apothecary to determine good gunpowder; of a smith to know the limitations of his weapon; of a cavalryman to get his weapon to the field; and once there he had to take advantage of the terrain in a way which only experience could teach. In all Italy there was probably only one better artilleryman than Vitelli—Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara, who had carried the study so far he was even then engaged in redesigning Ferrara's fortifications to prepare it for the new age. Vitell
ozzo Vitelli's skill, great in itself, was even more remarkable when his career was compared with that of his brother, Paolo. Paolo was reputedly a greater condottiere than his brother, and that was probably true in terms of the old values. But Paolo's hatred of artillery was extreme, his blindness to its potential so total that he habitually gouged out the eyes of captured gunners, declaring it disgraceful that such cowards should kill brave men from afar. Indirectly, Paolo paid the price of his conservatism. Hired by Florence to attack Pisa, he was defeated by the Pisans' superior skill in artillery and the Florentines hanged him for it. They could not believe that so great a captain could be indifferent to the new and vital craft and so believed that he was betraying them.
Cesare, by hiring Paolo's daringly innovative brother Vitellozzo, had shown at the very beginning of his career that he had abandoned the old forms of warfare and had skill enough to appreciate the skill of practitioners in the new form. The sixteen pieces of artillery under Vitellozzo were probably worth more to Cesare than the five thousand men brought by the other condottieri who now fought under his personal banner of the flame.
The army moved north along the Via Flaminia, another ancient road with a modern surface, but in other ways different from that Roman road down which the army had marched to Forli a year before. From Rome to Orte the Via Flaminia ran straight and flat enough, almost within calling distance of the green, full-bodied Tiber. But at Orte the road branched eastward and entered tortuous, haunted lands eternally echoing the sound of waters and full of ghosts, for these were studded with the cities of the race that had preceded even Rome. The road ran past Narni, past Terni with its thundering waterfalls; past Spoleto, which spread its skirts on the plain but kept its head in the hills. Lucrezia had been regent here for a time and Spoleto was sensibly Borgia in sympathies, but beyond lay less certain regions. The army continued compactly through the plain of Foligno, marching below the skeleton-white cities that clung to the hills on the right—withdrawn, self-sufficient communities which warily regarded the army from the eyeless sockets of gaunt watchtowers as they had regarded the march of a hundred such armies. Beyond the plain the road entered cruel country, winding frenziedly between hills that were impossibly steep for artillery. Vitellozzo remained long enough with the main body to launch a vicious attack upon Fossato, which foolishly had announced its intention of resistance; but after its walls had been pounded to dust and the dead heaped high, he took his precious artillery off to the North. The roads wound more gently here through the duchy of Urbino, passing below Urbino itself, which floated like a mirage on its twin hills. The army's passage caused consternation to the gentle Guidobaldo Montefeltro, lord of Urbino, but on this occasion he was treated chivalrously because Cesare still needed his help, and Vitellozzo had been accordingly warned. Cesare rode with the main body, joining his artillery at last on the Adriatic coast near the little city of Fano. His first and immediate goal was less than ten miles away up the coast road—the city-state of Pesaro, that of his former brother-in-law, Giovanni Sforza. But the artillery was not needed and neither were the soldiers. At news of the advancing army Giovanni Sforza had fled and the Pesarese opened their gates and decorated them to welcome the advent of their new lord.
The Fall of the House of Borgia Page 22