Lucrezia Borgia

by Sarah Bradford

  Lucrezia had failed in her duty to provide the Estes with a male heir and her sufferings were by no means over. On 13 September she had yet another relapse, so severe apparently that she felt her own pulse and exclaimed, ‘Oh good, I am dead.’ She added a codicil to her will which she had brought with her from Rome, to the benefit of Rodrigo Bisceglie. Rumours ran through the courts of Italy that she had been poisoned, the theory being that her failure to provide the Este with an heir had caused them to wish to rid themselves of the hated Borgia. This was unfair; not only had both Alfonso and Ercole expressed the greatest concern for her but Alfonso had vowed that, if Lucrezia survived, he would make a pilgrimage on foot to the shrine of the Madonna di Loreto. In the event, he changed his mind and went more comfortably by boat with Alexander’s specific dispensation from his original vow. By early October, Lucrezia was considered cured; while Alfonso left for Loreto, she took her court to the convent of Corpus Domini where, for three or four days, she intended to fulfil, out of the public eye, a vow made during her illness to wear only grey.40

  Elsewhere in Italy, Lucrezia’s family was approaching the zenith of its power. As the year came to a close Cesare committed one more great act of terror which has resounded down history, dubbed by his contemporaries ‘a most beautiful deception’. No one knows whether Lucrezia, sick as she was in the summer of 1502, had been aware of Cesare’s plans to extend and consolidate his position in Italy, nor of the incredible risks he had knowingly run. The danger lay in his own success in the takeover of the lands of the Church, planned from the day he was made Gonfalonier. By the end of June 1502 most of the former vicariates north of the Campagna were in his hands, Camerino was about to fall and Sinigallia, a small town on the Adriatic, was marked down for destruction. Around Rome all the lands of the Roman barons except those of the Orsini, his allies for the moment, had been taken over by the Borgias. Within the Papal States, Cesare’s chosen area of operation, only Bologna, Perugia, Città di Castello and Fermo remained outside his control and, as such, obvious targets. Cesare’s lightning attack on Urbino had marvellously concentrated the minds of the lords of these cities – most of whom were paid captains of Cesare’s – on the fate that could befall them too. At a meeting at Lake Trasimene, shortly after Guidobaldo’s overthrow, between Vitellozzo Vitelli of Città di Castello and Gian Paolo Baglioni of Perugia (both of them Cesare’s captains), grand words were spoken about the ‘great betrayal’ (of Urbino) executed by the Duke (Cesare) and they began ‘to recognize his marrano faith more clearly’.41

  Once again the key for the Borgia advance was the French King’s desire for the Kingdom of Naples. Throughout July and August, while in Rome Alexander talked openly and ominously of the Orsini and Vitellozzo Vitelli, and Cesare, as secret and as elusive as ever, went hunting with leopards in the hills round Urbino, his face covered with thin silk against the flies, Francesco Troche was working to persuade Louis to abandon his protection of the Orsini and the Bentivoglio of Bologna in return for Borgia support for his Naples campaign. Isabella d’Este, far more politically acute and cool-headed than her husband, had wind of this and warned Francesco to be careful:

  It is generally believed that His Most Christian Majesty has some understanding with Valentino, so I beg of you to be careful not to use words which may be repeated to him, because in these days we do not know who is to be trusted. There is a report here . . . that Your Excellency has spoken angry words against Valentino before the Most Christian King and the Pope’s servants . . . and they will doubtless reach the ears of Valentino, who, having already shown that he does not scruple to conspire against those of his own blood [a reference to the death of Gandia], will, I am certain, not hesitate to plot against your person . . . it would be perfectly easy to poison Your Excellency . . . 42

  Isabella herself was more cynical in her reactions to Cesare’s ‘nefarious’ crime against Guidobaldo and Elisabetta: the day before she wrote this warning letter to Francesco she had written to her brother Ippolito in Rome asking him to intercede with Cesare to help her acquire for herself two statues of Venus and Cupid which had been in the palace at Urbino. Cesare, who was in the process of packing up all Guidobaldo’s treasures, including his father Federigo’s celebrated library, and sending them to the Rocca di Forli, instantly obliged, sending a special messenger to deliver the statues to the cupidinous Isabella.

  Cesare’s unexpected arrival at the King’s court at Milan and the ostentatiously friendly welcome accorded him by Louis, frightened his enemy lords gathered there. Even Francesco Gonzaga who, on the day of Cesare’s arrival, had unwisely boasted to the Venetian envoy that he would fight a hand-to-hand duel with ‘that bastard son of a priest’, hastened to make his peace with il Valentino. ‘Today we have caressed and embraced each other, offering each to the other as good brothers, and thus together with the Most Christian Majesty we have spent all this day dancing and feasting . . .,’ he reassured Isabella.

  Cesare’s next objective was to be the Bentivoglio, the Este in-laws and rulers of Bologna, another papal vicariate. While Cesare laid plans for the next campaign, in Rome Alexander was intent on his long vendetta to avenge the death of Juan Gandia. On 25 September, Giulio Orsini told him to his face that the French had warned Cardinal Orsini at Milan that it was the Pope’s intention to ruin the house of Orsini. The next day the clan gathered for a family conference at Todi which could not bode well for the Borgias. This was followed by a meeting at Cardinal Orsini’s castle of La Magione, attended not only by the principal members of the Orsini family (one of whom, Paolo, was in Cesare’s employ), but a powerful group of Cesare’s captains who feared for their states, namely Vitellozzo Vitelli of Città di Castello, Oliverotto of Fermo and Gian Paolo Baglioni of Perugia, while the lords of threatened or surrendered cities – Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Giovanni Bentivoglio and Pandolfo Petrucci of Siena sent representatives. Baglioni warned the conspirators that if they did not take preventive action against il Valentino they would be ‘one by one devoured by the dragon’. The situation was fraught with danger for Cesare: on 7 October the revolt against him of the key fortress of San Leo in Urbino jolted the men at La Magione into action and on the 9th a League was signed against Cesare.

  Machiavelli was at Imola with a Florentine delegation to Cesare when the news of the League of La Magione arrived. He had the support of the King of France, Cesare told him, boasting that ‘events would show what kind of men they are and who I am’. He moved swiftly, raising troops and negotiating separate agreements with his conspiring captains who even agreed to help him regain Urbino. Guidobaldo, who had returned to Urbino following the revolt of San Leo, scarcely had time to gather up the few possessions Cesare had left him before going on the run again, this time to Venice. He also moved on Camerino, where the eighty-two-year-old Giulio Cesare Varano was strangled and his lordship then bestowed as a duchy by Alexander on his son, Giovanni Borgia. He made separate agreements with the Bentivoglio, Orsini and the other captains, all of whom agreed to continue fighting for him. Machiavelli sized up the sinister situation with his usual perspicacity:

  As to the suggested understanding . . . I do not augur well of it. For when I consider the . . . parties concerned, I see on the one hand Duke Cesare, vigorous, courageous, confident in his future, blessed with exceptional fortune, backed by the favour of the Pope and King . . . Confronting him, we have a group of lords who, even while they were his friends, were in anxiety for their possessions, and fearful of his growing power; and now, having thus injured him, and become his declared enemies, naturally more defensive still. So that I fail to understand how, on the one part, such injury can be expected to find forgiveness . . .43

  But Machiavelli, acute observer though he was, failed to penetrate the secrecy of Cesare’s intentions before il Valentino rode out of Imola in heavy snow to spend Christmas at Cesena, the capital of his province of Romagna. There, on Christmas morning, people were shocked to see the decapitated body of Cesare’s former Governor
of the Romagna and long-standing follower, Don Ramiro de Lorqua, displayed in the piazza, his black-bearded head impaled on a lance beside it. The ostensible reason given for his death was that Ramiro had been demoted by Cesare as a result of his unpopular treatment of the people of the Romagna and was being made an example of; but the real reason for his execution, as Alexander confessed later in Rome to the Venetian envoy, was that Cesare considered him a traitor for plotting with the conspirators against him. Once again it was an effective, deliberate act of terror. Cesare knew that the time had come for the final round in the contest with his condottieri and had already set the stage at Sinigallia, which his captains had agreed to take in his name from Guidobaldo’s sister, Giovanna, who ruled as regent in the name of her son, Giovanni Maria della Rovere.

  On 26 December, Cesare set off with his personal guard down the Via Emilia to meet his captains there, having sent small bodies of troops southward to mislead the conspirators into underestimating the strength of his forces. He had ordered them to withdraw their troops from the town so that he could quarter his own guard there, and that all but one of the gates should be locked. Outside the town the condottieri came to meet him, nervously surprised to see that he was wearing full battle armour although fighting was not expected. Cesare greeted them cordially, riding with them into Sinigallia past the drawn-up lines of his heavy cavalry. Behind them the gates were quietly closed. Nervous but unsuspecting the conspirators accompanied Cesare into a house specially selected for the purpose by Michelotto on the pretext of a meeting. There the conspirators were seized as they sat in their chairs round a table, their hands bound behind them. At two o’clock on the morning of New Year’s Day, Oliverotto and Vitellozzo, seated back-to-back on a bench, were garrotted on Michelotto’s orders. Cesare took the three Orsini – Paolo (father-in-law of Geronima Borgia), Francesco, Duke of Gravina (once considered a possible husband for Lucrezia) and Roberto – with him to meet a similar fate on the road to Rome, strangled at the castle of Sarteano on 18 January 1503. As he left, Cesare caught sight of Machiavelli. ‘This,’ he told him, ‘is what I wished to tell at Urbino, but I never trusted the secret to anyone, thus the occasion having come to me, I have known very well how to use it . . .’ In Rome, encouraged by Cesare’s success, Alexander arrested the aged Cardinal Orsini along with other family connections, including Rinaldo Orsini, Archbishop of Florence, and sent them to Sant’Angelo.

  Throughout Italy Cesare’s coup was regarded not only as a justifiable punishment for treachery but as a masterstroke. Machiavelli called it an ‘admirable deed’, the King of France ‘an act worthy of a Roman hero’, a later anti-Borgia historian, Paolo Giovio, ‘a most beautiful deception’. Isabella d’Este hastened to congratulate him with exaggerated expressions of affection, sending him a hundred carnival masks ‘because we believe that after the strains and fatigues which you have undergone in these your glorious undertakings, you should also find time to amuse yourself’. 44 She was still deep in negotiation over the projected marriage between her son, two-year-old Federico (born 17 May 1500), and Cesare’s daughter Luisa, of exactly the same age. But her real sentiments were echoed by di Prosperi in a cautious reference written on 6 January 1503 to ‘the sad news from the Romagna’.

  In Ferrara no one remarked upon any reaction from Lucrezia whose existence had protected the Este from her brother’s depredations. She and Alfonso danced and feasted through the first days of carnival. The Borgias were now at their apogee and Cesare’s successes underlined the necessity of propitiating them. For Lucrezia this had a satisfactory material outcome: the vexed question of her allowance had at last been settled to her satisfaction.45

  9. The Heavens Conspire

  ‘Furthermore, although you have now lost your very great father . . . this is not the first blow which you have suffered at the hands of your cruel and malevolent destiny . . . you would do well not to allow anyone to assume, as some might be led to infer in present circumstances, that you bewail not so much your loss but what may betide your present fortunes . . .’

  – Pietro Bembo to the grieving Lucrezia on the death of Alexander VI, 22 August 1503

  Young (she was still not quite twenty-three), beautiful and now restored to health, Lucrezia, with her close group of ladies, Angela Borgia, Nicola and Elisabetta senese, were the focus of court life. Since Ercole was a widower, she was already known as ‘la duchessa’ and she was the centre of attention in Ferrara. With renewed confidence in herself and a strong sense of having returned from the brink of death, Lucrezia set out to enjoy life. Duke Ercole had given in over the question of her allowance: on 10 January, di Prosperi reported that she was to have 6,000 ducats for herself and 6,000 for the clothing and salaries of her household – the 12,000 ducats which Alexander had been insisting upon. She felt free to enjoy herself, often occupying the place of honour as she did on 19 February when she and Ercole presided over a comedy by Plautus in the Sala Grande. Seated alone with Ercole in front of two tribunals, one occupied by gentlewomen, the other by gentlemen and citizens, she was described by the local chronicler as ‘most richly dressed with great jewels’.

  Isabella’s principal spy, El Prete, was in Ferrara for carnival that year, apparently accompanying his master, Niccolò da Correggio. He was adept at telling Isabella what she wanted to hear, usually to Lucrezia’s discredit. She had appeared at a ball in the house of the Roverella, apparently in a bad temper, ‘which it seems she is always in nowadays’. She was always in conversation with Don Giulio, perhaps her favourite, as he was his father’s. She danced the torch dance, ‘ballo da la torza’, with Ferrante, and then Giulio, and her last dance with Alfonso. El Prete liked to make out how difficult Lucrezia was, dining alone with her beloved Angela Borgia and being disagreeable to her Ferrarese ladies. On one occasion, he said, two of them refused to put on masks: ‘she rebuked them so that they were reduced to tears’.1 More honest and less sycophantic than El Prete, di Prosperi reported earlier on Lucrezia’s efforts to familiarize herself with Ferrara and its ways. She had dined at the monastery of San Giorgio and at the Certosa: ‘and I understand that every Saturday she wishes to visit one of our convents to see the places and enjoy our town better than she has up till now’.2 Even Isabella’s sister-in law, Laura Bentivoglio, married to Giovanni Gonzaga, gave her a good report: ‘Her manners and comportment seem to me all gracious and friendly and happy,’ she wrote, adding that Lucrezia had expressed herself as anxious that Isabella should write to her sometimes ‘and behave in a more intimate manner than hitherto’.

  Strangely enough, the charge of being too formal had been levied against Lucrezia by Isabella the previous year – ‘there is no need to use such terms of reverence [to me] being your cordial sister’3 – but the rivalry between the two, especially in terms of clothes, remained. Lucrezia questioned Laura Bentivoglio closely about Isabella’s wardrobe and particularly the manner in which she dressed her hair. Isabella spent a fortnight at Ferrara that spring, in anticipation of which, according to a malicious later report by Cattaneo, Lucrezia had pawned some of her jewellery to pay for splendid clothes to dazzle her sister-in-law and had asked her father to give her the year’s income of the bishopric of Ferrara.4 Lucrezia welcomed her sister-in-law to Ferrara with a great show of graciousness, organizing Spanish dances to the sound of tambourines, and a keyboard competition between Vincenzo da Modena and the Duke’s organist, Antonio dall’Organo; and with her she attended a series of elaborately staged miracle plays ordered by Ercole to be performed in the Duomo. After Isabella returned to Mantua, Lucrezia wrote her a letter of exaggerated friendliness: ‘It would be difficult for me to express the supreme pleasure and consolation which I recently received from your most welcome letter,’ she wrote on 17 May, ‘particularly for the news of your most pleasant journey and . . . safe arrival’, going on to insist on how much she missed Isabella, particularly now that Alfonso had ‘left for Marina’.

  But, far from feeling bereft and lonely in the absence of Is
abella and, more significantly, Alfonso, Lucrezia as the beautiful young Duchess had become the focus and inspiration of a court of literary young men. Ercole was now old, and devoted rather to music and the theatre, while Alfonso, despite a humanistic education, inclined to the visual arts and was uninterested in literature. On the announcement of her betrothal, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti had composed Colloquium ad Ferrarem urbem in honour of the wedding and sent two magnificently illuminated copies, one to Ercole and one to Lucrezia, the previous November. Lucrezia’s arrival in Ferrara and her marriage had been the occasion for the most extravagant epithets by poets, including Ludovico Ariosto, who had composed an epithalamium for her marriage and was later to complete his masterwork, Orlando Furioso, the romantic epic poem on the Este which featured Lucrezia. Her arrival had also been celebrated by the Latin poets, father and son Tito and Ercole Strozzi, and her circle included the disreputable poet Antonio Tebaldeo (then in the service of Ippolito but who later became her secretary), and expanded to include the great Venetian printer Aldus Manutius (who at one point made her the executor of his will) and the celebrated humanist Giangiorgio Trissino. Lucrezia took their eulogies, which included describing her as ‘most beautiful virgin’ and comparing her with the swan in the famous frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia, with a large pinch of salt, but she developed a close friendship with Ercole Strozzi and through him a passionate relationship with one of the most famous young writers in Italy, Pietro Bembo.