But "the duke, who still occupies quarters in the Castel Sant' Angelo, is in greater hope than ever of doing great things, for he believes that a pope favorable to him will be elected,"81 Machiavelli reported. He had arrived in Rome on October 27, despatched there by his government to keep track of the bewildering events. He remained there until the spring of 1504; and so was able to chart, almost hourly, Cesare's fall into the abyss just as he had been able to plot his rise to supreme power. Astonishingly, Machiavelli found Cesare pinning his hopes on the election of Giuliano della Rovere, Alexander's bitterest enemy. "No one can be unaware of the natural hate which [della Rovere] bears him, for he could not so readily forget the exile in which he has been kept for ten years. The duke, on the other hand, allows himself to be guided by a blind confidence. He imagines that the word of others is more sincere than his own had been."
Cesare was not blindly confident; he was taking a calculated risk. The unpredictable currents that could sweep a man into the supreme office had abruptly altered in favor of della Rovere. On October 29, two days before the conclave opened, betting in the city had given him a sixty per cent chance while Ascanio Sforza, the nearest rival, had a mere eight per cent. The night before the conclave, betting in della Rovere's favor had soared to ninety per cent, and even before the conclave opened, the rest of the Sacred College were already scrambling for his favors. He who had so piously protested the simony which had disgraced Alexander's election, now liberally distributed favors, whether in promises of hard cash or benefices. He was all the more generous in that, as Machiavelli later observed, "this pope settles his debts in the best of all ways—he wipes them out with the cotton-wool of his inkwell." But despite the high percentage in his favor, della Rovere badly needed the votes of the eleven Spanish cardinals who formed Cesare's following in the Sacred College to make up the necessary two-thirds. They could not hope to elect one of their own, for it would be a very long time before Italy would again stomach a Spanish pope; but they could block the chances of another man. Della Rovere swallowed his pride and went to see Cesare personally. In return for the Spanish, votes, he swore that if elected pope he would not merely confirm Cesare in his office of captain-general but would do all in his power to re-establish him in his dukedom. Accepting, Cesare instructed his cardinals to vote for the man who had been the bitterest, most consistent enemy of his house. With the certain backing of the Spanish group, della Rovere's election was assured. The conclave itself was a mere formality, lasting little more than an hour, and at the end Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere emerged as Pope Julius II.
He could not have chosen a better name. Indeed, his fellow-Genoese boasted that he more closely resembled some antique emperor than a pope. All Italians would remember him as the "Papa Terribile"—the "awesome pope"—who, in a tempestuous pontificate, reshaped the face of the country and made Rome a wonder of the Renaissance world. They witnessed again the change that came upon a man with the winning of the tiara. The devious bureaucrat, who had sulked ten years under the protection of the French disappeared and in his place emerged one of the greatest of Italian generals. The good looks of his youth had gone but the introspection remained and deepened; the white-bearded, powerful face, when seen in repose seemed that of an Old Testament prophet. But periods of repose were rare; men felt they were in the presence of a briefly dormant volcano.
He has not the patience to listen quietly to what you say to him, and to take men as he finds them. But those who know how to manage him, and whom he trusts, say that his will is good. No one has any influence over him and he consults few, or none. ... It is almost impossible to describe how stron& and violent and difficult to manage he is. In body and soul he has the nature of a giant. Everything about him is on a magnified scale . . . there is nothing in him that is small or meanly selfish.82
He was also, from his point of view, an honest man. The purchase of votes at an election was an accepted commonplace, the means whereby he took a short-cut to one great goal: the restoration to the Church of the things of the Church. And that included, pre-eminently, those states of the Church at present forming part of the dukedom of Cesare Borgia.
Initially, the new pope gave every indication of intending to honor his promise to Cesare. A brief was sent to Florence ordering the Florentines to give the duke of Romagna free passage through their state so that he could return to the Romagna, and Cesare himself was given a pressing invitation to leave his cramped quarters in Sant' Angelo and resume residence in the Vatican. Rome was agog with rumors regarding the relationship between the two men and what Cesare's intentions were. Machiavelli summarized the position for his government.
The pope has promised everything asked of him—but the difficulty will be in making him keep this promise. As for the Duke of Valentinois, it is said that he [Julius] has promised to reinstate him in the Duchy of Romagna, and as a pledge has yielded him the port of Ostia, where the Duke has two ships and some troops. The Duke occupies an apartment, known as the Nuove Stanze, in the palace, living there with about forty of his old servants. No one knows whether or not he intends to stay. Some believe that he will go to Genoa, where he has deposited the great part of his money, and that from there he will proceed to Lombardy to raise troops and march on Romagna. He seems in a position to do this for he still has two hundred thousand ducats or more, most of it invested with Genoese merchants. Others say he will not leave Rome but is waiting there for the pope's coronation when, as he was promised, he will be proclaimed gonfalonier of the Church and so be enabled to recover his dukedom.
Julius may well have intended to keep his word, in letter and spirit. He was, above all else, a realist and it was clear to him that were Cesare removed, a vacuum of power would be created in the Romagna—and that vacuum would be filled immediately by Venice, no more friendly toward the Holy See as a temporal power than any other Italian state and considerably more capable of causing harm. Already Faenza and Rimini were under direct Venetian influence. Forli, too, had fallen. The Romagna, in Cesare's absence, was breaking down into its component parts, which were again being dominated by separate lords. Julius wanted the return of the Papal States in their entirety, and if he could have trusted Cesare to act as a loyal vicar of the Church, then Cesare would certainly have been reinstated. But no man who knew Cesare Borgia could possibly believe he would remain contented for long in a subordinate position. "Aut Caesar, aut nihil" was the motto displayed on his sword; Julius would have been remarkably naive not to have taken the boast at its face value. He was statesman enough to realize that Venice, in the long run, represented a far more serious threat to the Papal States than did Cesare; but ten years' exile, ten years spent brooding about the Borgia, seemed to have temporarily blinded Julius to that worse threat. Only a week after Machiavelli reported that Cesare seemed about to recoup all he had lost, Julius summoned the Venetian ambassador to discuss Venetian interests in the Romagna. "We want the States to return to the Church," he said firmly. "It is Our intention to recover that which Our predecessors have so malevolently alienated." Outrageously, he flattered the Venetians "with sweet and loving words," then turned to the question of Cesare. "We made promise of certain things to the Duke, but we intended by that merely a guarantee of his personal safety and the possession of his moveable property— wealth which, after all, he merely stole from its rightful owners."83
Cesare as yet knew nothing of this change of attitude. Machiavelli visited him on November 8, the first time the two had met since January when Cesare, in his towering confidence, had graciously invited the Florentines to share in his conquest of Italy. Machiavelli found him now cursing Florence, for the Florentines, as skilled at scenting weakness as the Venetians, had not only declined to provide him a safe conduct but had actually participated in the attack on Forli. "In words full of venom and passion," he predicted the immediate ruin of Florence now that the republic's protectors, the French, were running from the Spaniards, "and he would laugh at it. And he declared that never again w
ould he be mocked by you." Machiavelli held his tongue and, as he expected, Cesare had changed his position again a few days later. "It is best, he says, to let bygones be bygones, to think no more about the past, but only of the common benefit, to act in such a way that the Venetians are prevented from becoming masters of the Romagna. He added that the Pope was ready to help him." The cold eye of the Florentine envoy noted that the young man had begun to crumble, swinging from one extreme of policy and of mood to the other.
On the night of November 18 Cesare unobtrusively left Rome with a small escort and arrived safely at Ostia, where he boarded one of the galleys waiting for him. It was believed he might sail up the coast to Genoa, but he was still in a state of acute indecision waiting, perhaps, for Julius to exert his full authority and, with that powerful backing, hurl out the invaders in the Romagna. Julius did, indeed, come to a decision but it was not what Cesare hoped or expected. The pope had now grasped the essentials of the situation: the Venetians were flooding into the states but most of the strongpoints were in the hands of Cesare's troops. Acting with his usual violent impetuosity, Julius sent a peremptory order to Cesare at Ostia that Cesare should immediately disclose the passwords so that papal troops could enter the strongpoints and take over the defense. Cesare refused—and, Machiavelli believed, thereby destroyed himself. An outright refusal was the one thing that Julius II could never tolerate. "The rumor is going about that the duke was thrown into the Tiber on orders from above. I cannot confirm or deny it. What I do think is that if it is not done yet it will be."
It was not done because Julius still needed the essential passwords. Without them, the meager forces at his disposal would have been forced to fight on two fronts— holding off the Venetians with one hand while attempting to dislodge Cesare's garrisons from their well-fortified positions with the other. Reacting promptly to Cesare's refusal, Julius despatched a strong guard to Ostia with orders to bring Cesare back to Rome, by force if necessary. The farce of negotiations between equals was at an end; Cesare was to be imprisoned until he obeyed. He was dragged off the galley in Ostia, and on that same day Mi- chelotto Corella was defeated by two of his master's former condottieri. Julius immediately demanded that Corella be handed over to papal custody "to be questioned about the deaths of many persons, the most important of whom are the duke of Gandia, the lord of Camerino and his two sons —who had their throats cut, the lord of Faenza and his brother, Duke Alfonso of Bisceglie, the lord of Sermoneta, the archbishop of Cagli. . . . "84
Cesare's arrest marked the moment of his final decline
In Rome, Giustinian showed the decisive change in public opinion by refusing to call upon Cesare, although Cesare urgently requested him to do so, and Julius would not have forbidden it. It was a mean-spirited action but it showed, at least, that the Venetian ambassador was thoroughly in tune with his surroundings. Swiftly, word spread through Rome that Cesare's iron will was now broken, that he, the man who had once looked upon either triumph or disaster with the same apparent indifference, was now a weeping wreck, full of self-pity and apologies. "It seems to me that, little by little, this duke of ours is sliding into his grave," Machiavelli reported with clinical detachment. There was report of a poignant interview between Cesare and one of his victims, Guidobaldo Montefeltro, where Cesare fell on his knees, groveling, begging for pardon, promising to return the art treasures he had stolen from Urbino. Julius, whether by accident or design, confined Cesare in the same room in the Torre Borgia where Lucrezia's second husband, Alfonso, had been murdered by Michelotto Corella. Cesare, it was stated, wept and protested and had to be dragged in. It is probable that his total collapse could mostly be attributed to the effects of his recent serious illness but, in the cold eyes of Renaissance diplomats, the effect was the same. It was during these days that Machiavelli revised his opinion of the man he had once thought might be the leader of a united Italy. In his eyes there had been two Cesares. The splendid Duke Valentino would be enshrined for all time as "The Prince"—but the cowering, chattering invalid was fit only for a gallery of second-rate failures.
Under the shock of imprisonment Cesare's will to resist ended and, obediently, he dictated the passwords to the papal commissioners. But now both he and Julius met an unexpected obstacle, the stubborn loyalty of Cesare's entrenched commanders in the Romagna. Anticipating what indeed happened, Julius had insisted that one of Cesare's personal servants should accompany the papal commissioners when they went to demand the surrender of the fortess in Cesena. The man, Pedro d'Oviedo, was known to be loyal to Cesare but the Spanish governor of the castle hanged him as a traitor. The governor's misplaced loyalty, and the loyalty of others like him, condemned Cesare to another four months' imprisonment. He pleaded his helplessness in the matter but Julius was not convinced. The most he would do was allow Cesare to take up residence in Ostia under strong guard, and there he remained throughout February and March while the Spanish cardinals in Rome urged his case with the pope. It was not until April 12 that the major strongpoints were yielded, and Cesare immediately demanded his release. A week later he sailed south to Naples.
On December 28 had been fought the battle of the Garigliano in which the Spaniards finally crushed the power of France in the south of Italy. Henceforth, the Kingdom of Naples was a Spanish possession and, in seeking refuge there, Cesare was virtually severing himself from his long and profitable association with Louis of France. Exactly why Cesare made the choice can only be conjectured, for by leaving Rome he moved out of the orbit of the ambassadors and observers who hitherto had recorded his activities almost by the hour. He was probably influenced by the fact that members of the Borgia family had sought refuge in Naples from the moment it was known that Julius was hostile to him. Cesare, ever an opportunist, may have acknowledged the long dormant ties with Spain because
Spain was now in ascendancy. But he was ignorant of his standing at the court of Spain. Even while he was imprisoned in Ostia, Ferdinand and Isabella had written their ambassador in Rome, telling him that "Their Majesties have strictly directed Gonzalo to aid the pope in recovering Imola, Forli and Cesena to the Church, seeing that they hold the interests of the pope even above their own." Such an act was, perhaps, only incidentally hostile to Cesare, a mere by-product of the desire of Their Catholic Majesties to make peace with Julius in order to consolidate their gains in southern Italy. But Cesare had forgotten, or chose to ignore the fact, that Isabella of Spain had a personal dislike for him, a dislike continually fueled by the hatred that his brother's widow, Maria Enriquez, had held against him ever since Juan's murder. That was made plain in the dispatch sent in the name of both monarchs to their ambassador just four days after Cesare had arrived in Naples.
This journey of the duke we regard with deep displeasure, and not for political reasons alone. For, as you know, we hold the man in deep abhorrence for the gravity of his crimes, and we have no desire whatever that a man of such repute should be considered as in our service, even though he came to us laden with fortresses, with men and with money. We have written to the duke of Terranova [Gonzalo] that he send the duke to us, providing two galleys for the voyage, so that he cannot escape elsewhere. Or Gonzalo may send him to the emperor, or to France tojoin his wife.85
Unaware of the new storm building around him, Cesare seems to have regained his old confidence on setting foot in Naples. The night after his arrival he dined with Sancia. She had escaped from Rome at about the time he was first imprisoned, with the aid of an old enemy of his, Prosper Colonna, and had become Colonna's mistress in Naples. The fascination that Cesare held for Sancia seems to have been undiminished by his recent troubles, and bygones were apparently to become bygones. Joffre, too, was in Naples but that marriage was over for all practical purposes.
Cesare resumed his old life with joy, throwing himself into the business of raising troops. Sooner or later the Spanish must continue the advance to the north, and it seemed to him axiomatic that Gonzalo de Cordoba would include him in any such
undertaking. And once in the north, with a Spanish contingent behind him, there would be nothing to prevent his marching into the Romagna, scattering his enemies and reigning once again as Cesare Borgia of France. So for three weeks of a beautiful Neapolitan spring, his life was full, happy and hopeful, alternating between the barrack yard, the ballroom and the bedroom. Perhaps a little coldness existed between himself and Gonzalo—no longer a general but now the Spanish viceroy in Italy, indication not only of his status but of Spain's in Italy. Gonzalo proved oddly reluctant to provide funds for troops, seemed curiously lukewarm about the prospect of attaching the famous Cesare Borgia to his staff. But Cesare, if he thought about this at all, put it down simply to the long-held dislike the Spaniard seemed to have for the Borgia.
By the third week of May, Cesare had made full preparations for an independent advance to the north. Throughout the weeks Gonzalo had stood aside, watching. In his files were explicit instructions from his queen that Cesare Borgia should not be allowed to participate in any military operations in Italy, either independently or as part of a major Spanish campaign. But viewed from another angle, Cesare, a fellow-Spaniard, had sought refuge in territories under Gonzalo's command. The Spanish cardinals who had negotiated this asylum for Cesare were certainly under the impression that Gonzalo had given his word that Cesare would not be molested. Later there were to be bitter accusations of treachery on the part of Gonzalo, but even had he provided Cesare with a safe-conduct, it was limited strictly to the Kingdom of Naples. And now that Cesare had made it obvious he intended throwing all north Italy into uproar, thereby embroiling the Catholic monarchs with the formidable Julius II, there was but one path Gonzalo de Cordoba could follow.
The Fall of the House of Borgia Page 29