Little is known about Rodrigo Borgia’s early life, apart from the fact that his father died when he was just six. Even the exhaustive researches of his hagiographer Peter de Roo can only come up with the recorded anecdote that ‘when eight years old, the boy was often seen riding a pony through the streets of Xàtiva’. Soon after this Rodrigo travelled with his mother and the family to Valencia, where they moved into no less than the episcopal palace. By this stage, Uncle Alonso (the future Callixtus III) was Bishop of Valencia, but had been obliged to move to Naples in the service of King Alfonso of Aragon, who had now also become King of Naples. Here Rodrigo and his older brother Pedro Luis were given a classical education by a private tutor.
Uncle Alonso soon began to take a serious interest in the education of his nephews: Rodrigo, Pedro Luis and their cousin Luis Juan de Milà. According to Borgia biographer G. J. Meyer:
Vatican records show Rodrigo and Luis Juan being singled out, as early as the reign of [Pope] Eugenius IV, for benefices, offices generating ecclesiastical income, that would have been unimaginable without the intervention of a patron who had access to the Pope’s ear and the King of Aragon’s as well.
Thus, while Rodrigo was still a schoolboy he began receiving benefices, first a post at his birthplace Xàtiva, and then from the cathedrals of Barcelona and Valencia. Such benefices were virtual sinecures and did not in this case require their holders to be inducted into the Church.
By the time Rodrigo was eighteen his Uncle Alonso had become a cardinal and had retired from King Alonso’s service, moving from Naples to Rome. Cardinal Alonso may have been a man of high spiritual demeanour, but he was determined that his protégés – Rodrigo, Pedro Luis and Luis Juan de Milà – should receive a first-class university education. But at this time the best universities were all in Italy, while his protégés were confined to Spain. The trouble was, if Rodrigo, or the others, left Spain they would immediately forfeit the income from their Spanish benefices. In Rome, Cardinal Alonso had a word with his new friend Pope Nicholas V, who then issued a papal bull* allowing the three young Borgias to travel to Italy without forfeiting any income they were receiving in Spain. Rodrigo and his two young relatives now travelled together to Italy, to study at the University of Bologna.
Bologna was at the time a papal fiefdom; though unlike Naples this strategic city state was more closely under papal control. Its university was founded in 1088 and claims to be the oldest in the world. It even coined the word ‘universitas’ and its crest contained the first use of the term ‘alma mater’ in its modern sense. Traditionally it was noted for the teaching of canon and civil law. (At the time, canon law was applied by the ecclesiastical authorities to those within the Church. Civil law was quite separate in its statutes and its courts, which applied exclusively to the lay members of the population.) The poets Dante and Petrarch had studied here prior to Rodrigo Borgia’s arrival. And in the immediate years after he left, the great humanist Erasmus of Amsterdam; the astronomer Copernicus, who first proposed that the Earth travelled around the Sun; and the maverick physician Paracelsus, who became a pioneer of modern medicine, would all study here. This gives an indication of the academic excellence of Bologna, and makes even more impressive the fact that Borgia was judged by a contemporary as ‘the most eminent and judicious jurisprudent’. Yet it would hardly be accurate to judge that Rodrigo Borgia’s student years were all work and no play. For a start, his Spanish benefices would have made him and his cousins as wealthy as any fellow students from the nobility. The three young Borgias would certainly have lived in some style. According to the contemporary commentator Gaspare da Verona, ‘[Rodrigo Borgia] is handsome, of a pleasant and cheerful countenance . . . With a single glance he can fascinate women, and attract them to himself more strongly than a magnet draws iron.’ However, as the papal historian John Julius Norwich observes, drawing on the same source: ‘What he lacked was the slightest glimmer of religious feeling.’ Rodrigo Borgia also made it abundantly clear from the very outset ‘that he was in the Church for what he could get out of it’.
As we have seen, in 1455 Rodrigo Borgia’s uncle Alonso ascended the papal throne to become Callixtus III. In line with precedent, he divested himself of all his previous offices; consequently his favourite protégés, the three young Borgia cousins, soon ‘inherited’ many of his high offices. Within months of Callixtus III’s accession, the oldest, Luis Juan de Milà, was made a cardinal and papal legate to the city of Bologna. In effect this made him governor of the city, which occupied the northerly part of the Papal States. Cardinal de Milà would in time become so attached to his city that after attending one conclave, he would turn down his next invitation to Rome for such a gathering, much to the irritation of his cousin Rodrigo Borgia. However, Cardinal de Milà’s attachment to Bologna cannot have been that strong, for after a number of years ‘he seems to have preferred a quiet life in Spain’. From here, there was no hope of tempting him to any further conclaves in Rome.
Again, as we have seen, Rodrigo Borgia’s older brother, the ‘handsome . . . arrogant and energetic’ Pedro Luis was made Captain-General of the Papal Forces and commandant of the Castel Sant’Angelo. This, however, proved to be no simple matter. The contemporary incumbent, Giorgio di Saluzzo, Bishop of Lausanne, was initially reluctant to hand over the keys to his young successor. But frail and old though Callixtus III may have been, he remained a man of considerable determination. The bishop was immediately threatened with excommunication, whereupon he changed his mind and Pedro Luis Borgia took over his post. The military was the traditional choice for an older brother, especially if he showed suitable qualities; but it seems that appearances may have been deceptive where Pedro Luis was concerned. As we shall see, despite his apparent overweening fortitude he was in fact prone to being stricken down with serious illness.
Like his older cousin Luis Juan de Milà, the twenty-five-year-old Rodrigo Borgia was also appointed a cardinal, with the titular church of San Nicola in Carcere.* Within months of his appointment, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia was despatched on his first important mission. He was appointed papal legate to the March of Ancona, the Papal Territory south of the Romagna, which had recently overthrown papal rule. Rodrigo’s brief was to lead a papal force across the Apennines and restore papal rule. As the papal troops approached the port city of Ancona, they threatened to lay siege to the town of Ascoli, which at once surrendered. From then on, his mission proved more diplomatic and tactical, with little use of force required. Through sheer force of character, a blend of threat and charm, Cardinal Borgia managed to resolve this potentially hazardous state of affairs by means of negotiation and decisive appointments. As the contemporary historian Guicciardini (no admirer of Borgia) would concede: ‘in him were combined rare prudence and vigilance, mature reflection, marvellous power of persuasion, skill and capacity for the conduct of the most difficult affairs’.
Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia’s success in Ancona proved more than just good news for Callixtus III himself. It vindicated his controversial nepotism, forestalling what might have proved some difficult recriminations from his other cardinals. Some months after Callixtus III’s election as pope, he had summoned a secret consistory of the relatively few cardinals remaining in Rome at the time. During the course of this he had browbeaten the dozen cardinals present into allowing him to appoint his two Borgia nephews to their high office. This was not only transparent nepotism, but also highly irregular with regard to their ages – less than half that of almost all previous cardinals. As a concession, Callixtus III had been forced to agree that these appointments should not be publicly announced. However, he insisted that if a conclave were called (in the event of his death), the two young Borgias should have their appointments made public, thus qualifying them to take part, and cast their votes for the next pope. The cardinals were forced to agree to this, on threat of excommunication. Callixtus III must have ensured that the cardinals were shown a papal bull to this effect, already dated, which could be re
leased in case of disobedience to his wishes. However, according to Aeneas Piccolomini, who would become a cardinal shortly after this:
the other cardinals hoped to deceive the Pope, who they thought would die soon, but in the end it was the Pope who deceived the cardinals for, that summer, when there was only one cardinal left in Rome, he made the creation public.
Having bested the opposition, Callixtus III now decided to reward Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia for his work in Ancona by appointing him Vice-Chancellor. Callixtus III must have had supreme confidence in his nephew. Cardinal Borgia was still just twenty-six, and Vice-Chancellor of the Church was not only one of the most prestigious posts (rewarded with an annual income of some 6,000 ducats), but it was also one of the most powerful. The Vice-Chancellor was to all intents and purposes in charge of the day-to-day running of the Curia, the papal government. At the same time, all new appointments passed through his office, offering a supreme opportunity for the extraction of ‘gifts’ or other payments from the grateful appointees. Such rewards were regarded as common practice at the time, rather than corruption. Cardinal Borgia now enjoyed the prospect of great power and great riches. Yet as he well knew, this good fortune could only last as long as his uncle was pope. Such high position, especially gained by one so young, and through family influence, inevitably attracted all manner of envy and powerful enemies. Especially amongst the influential aristocratic families of Rome. And these might even strike before his uncle died.
Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia knew that if he was to survive and thrive as Vice-Chancellor he needed to utilize his renowned charm to make new friends beyond his family circle and the unpopular ‘Catalans’. As it happened, one of his first ‘new friends’ would be the recently appointed Cardinal Aeneas Piccolomini, a forty-three-year-old Sienese from an impoverished aristocratic family who had gained a widespread reputation for his intellectual brilliance. Before the age of thirty, when he took holy orders, Piccolomini had shown such literary promise that he was considered one of the finest poets in the land, famed for the penning of romances, which with hindsight we can see echoed episodes in his own life. However, the popularity of his works had not always stemmed from their purely literary qualities, for they also included ‘not only a quantity of mildly pornographic poetry, but also a novel in much the same vein’. His winning personality and evident abilities had proved attractive to the earlier pope Eugenius IV, as well as several senior cardinals. Consequently he had been entrusted with a number of important diplomatic missions taking him all over Europe. Yet his winning ways had proved attractive to more than senior men of the Church. Whilst on a mission to Scotland, he had fathered a child. And several years later, whilst in Strasbourg, there had been a similar episode. In both cases the children died in infancy. In the event, neither these incidents nor his pornographic poems had proved an impediment to him taking holy orders. Nor, according to widespread gossip, had it prevented him from becoming involved in a number of similar indiscretions, and continuing to pen a wide variety of poetry.
Yet Piccolomini had a further side to his multi-faceted character. Surprisingly, this was his faith and his determination. On occasion, his diplomatic missions had placed him in perilous circumstances. In particular, on his 1435 mission to Scotland, when his boat crossing the North Sea from Bruges ran into two violent gales. As Piccolomini described it in his memoirs (where he refers to himself in the third person) one of these storms ‘kept them in fear of death for fourteen hours’, while the other drove them off course towards Norway, and ‘pounded the ship for two days and a night, so that she sprung a leak’. On stepping safely ashore, Piccolomini vowed that he would walk in his bare feet to the nearest shrine to the Virgin Mary, in gratitude for his salvation. This proved somewhat further than he had bargained. The fulfilment of his vow would involve a ten-mile trek through snow and across ice in the midst of a harsh Scottish winter, where daylight was ‘not more than four hours long’. The frostbite he suffered in the process was so severe that for the rest of his life he would walk with a limp and suffer intermittent bouts of incapacitating pain in his foot. As we have seen, Callixtus III later made Piccolomini a cardinal and even Bishop of Siena. Here was a man whose intellectual tastes and determination chimed perfectly with those of the young Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia.
As if Callixtus III did not have enough to concern him, especially with regards to the assembling of his crusade, in October 1457 Pedro Luis Borgia, the Captain-General of the Papal Forces, was suddenly stricken with a serious illness, which rendered him incapable of fulfilling his duties. With typical disregard for the usual rules and precedents, Callixtus III unhesitatingly appointed Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia as replacement Captain-General. Here, even the accomplished Rodrigo Borgia suddenly found himself out of his depth. Previously, he had only acted as commander of the small force he led into the Ancona March, relying heavily for tactics upon his military second-in-command, a career soldier. In this instance, Borgia’s chief role had been as a negotiator. Even after this single experience, he would have known little of military matters, apart from the writings of Herodotus, Caesar and the like, whom he would have studied in the course of his classical education. However, this experience of being plunged in at the deep end would certainly have added to his expertise. Later, as his dream of empire blossomed, he would undeniably have needed to understand the rudiments of military strategy. And as we shall see, there is good evidence that he was not lacking in a knowledge of the practicalities of campaigning. These he may well have gained in military exercises during his tenure as Captain-General. However, a few months later Pedro Luis would recover from his illness, enabling the young cardinal to resume full attention to his vital role as Vice-Chancellor.
Rome itself had now regained its prestige as the eternal city. Once more it had become a centre of pilgrimage, attracting a large influx of outsiders from all over Europe. This new popularity had begun a few years back, when Pope Nicholas V had declared that 1450 would be a holy year, celebrating the Jubilee of Christ’s birth. A description from around this time gives an idea of the sheer chaos this influx of pilgrims involved, as well as indicating that these pilgrimages were not limited to the warm summer months:
There were so many people in Rome that there was not enough accommodation for them all, even though every house became an inn. The pilgrims offered to pay generously and pleaded, for the love of God, to be taken in, but in vain, and they had to sleep outside where many died of the cold. It was terrible to witness. And so many came that the city itself starved.
Worse still, the entire purpose of their visit was often thwarted:
You could not get to St Peter’s because of the enormous crowds on the streets, and San Paolo Fuore le Mura, San Giovanni in Laterano and Santa Maria Maggiore were full of people praying. Rome was so full that it was impossible to get around. When the Pope gave his benediction at St Peter’s the whole area was densely packed with pilgrims, and they even filled the orchards where it was possible to see [down on] the benediction loggia.
It comes as no surprise that such conditions invariably brought with them disease. Rome was notorious for its malaria, which in those days was thought to be brought on by mal aria (‘bad air’). This caused many pilgrims to lull themselves into a false sense of security by using nosegays of sweet-smelling flowers held under their nostrils. It would take centuries before medical science discovered that the disease was spread by malarial mosquitoes, which infested the entire Pontine Marshes region south-east of Rome, and would spread to standing water in the city itself, especially during the hot summer months.
Worse still were the recurrent outbreaks of the plague. There was an outbreak in 1450, and yet another in 1451. In the late summer of 1456, during the reign of Callixtus III, there was a further outbreak. The following contemporary description, by the chronicler Giovanni Inghirami, is in fact of the 1450 outbreak, but could serve to describe any of these disastrous epidemics:
That evening in the church of San Celso there were
176 corpses, men and women, but mostly women . . . They say many more have fallen into the Tiber, including those who climbed on to the parapets to escape and those who were thrown in. Many who escaped had their clothes ripped off their backs and they were running about, some in their hose, others in shirts, some even naked, and the women all dishevelled, looking for their companions who they feared had died. By midnight San Celso was full of the dead; some found a father, others a mother, a brother or a son, and their cries deafened the city.
At the onset of the 1456 outbreak, anyone who could fled the city. This included all the cardinals, apart from a certain Cardinal Domenico Capranica – and Callixtus III himself. It was on this occasion that he called a one-cardinal Consistory, following which he publicly announced the appointment of his young nephew Rodrigo as a cardinal. However, after just over a year of his reign, it became evident that all was not well with the seventy-seven-year-old Callixtus III. In early October 1456 the ambassador for Milan went so far as to write home that the Pope had been confined to his bed with what appeared to be a mortal illness, and ‘his condition is such that he might die at any moment’.
Over the coming years, there would be more than a dozen such reports, but still Callixtus III hung on, doing his best to collect troops for the crusade, venting his anger on King Alfonso of Naples for his lack of support:
You traitorously used our money to betray us. God and the Holy See will bring retribution down on you! Alfonso, King of Aragon, aid Pope Callixtus, because if you do not God will surely punish you.
He insisted on trying to create three new cardinals, in order to bolster the Spanish contingent, but, according to Cardinal Piccolomini:
There was a bitter argument in the consistory, because the Pope wanted to create cardinals, but was opposed by the college [of cardinals]. First they argued that there were too many cardinals already and then poured scorn on the men he nominated, arguing vociferously against all of them. Callixtus, however, got the better of the college, especially thanks to the vigorous assistance of those three cardinals he had already created and made it clear to the college that he was in charge, as was fitting.
The Borgias Page 5