The trial of the conspirators began, on Alfonso’s orders, on 3 August, in the privacy of Sigismondo d’Este’s house and concluded with sentences against Albertino Boschetti, Gherardo de’Roberti and Franceschino Boccacci da Rubiera. The guilt of Ferrante and Giulio was pronounced on 25 August and 9 September. The judges (the Savi) were among the most distinguished men in Ferrara, and the executive sentence was given on 9 September by their leader, the Giudice dei XII Savi, Antonio Costabili. The involvement of the Savi showed that Alfonso was determined to keep to his oath of justice; there were to be no summary punishments even though the eventual fate of all the conspirators was to be cruel. Ferrante had been under arrest since 29 July when Alfonso had personally accompanied him to the castle and had him imprisoned in a room in the Torre Marchesana. After four days, the windows were blocked halfway up so that Ferrante could not see out.
On the same day Alfonso had had Gherardo de’Roberti brought from Carpi and taken through the piazza to the piazzetta where a great crowd waited to see him. From the windows of Alfonso’s rooms in the via coperta the triumvirate of Alfonso, Lucrezia and Ippolito watched. Afterwards, Alfonso visited de’Roberti in the castle dungeon to interrogate him: enraged, he seized a baton and gave him such a blow that he almost took out an eye. De’Roberti was then consigned to the lowest dungeon of the Great Tower and shackled. The discovery of the plot, symbolized by the imprisonment of the two men, was greeted with the ringing of all the bells, and bonfires were lit that evening all over the city; this continued for three days. Lucrezia and the noblewomen of Ferrara attended solemn mass sung by the ducal singers in the cathedral, and afterwards thanksgiving processions wound through the city, attended by Alfonso and Ippolito with the noblemen and populace.
Lucrezia no doubt found the whole business hard to bear and the tension within the family and household excruciating. She had been fond of both Ferrante and Giulio: Ferrante had been her proxy husband at the Vatican ceremony and her companion on her wedding journey north. Giulio had frequently accompanied her on her forays to the Este villas and had been one of her favourite dancing partners. Ippolito was ruthless and unyielding, Alfonso bitter and emotional. On 19 August Lucrezia rode to Belriguardo for a few days to escape the atmosphere. Alfonso remained nervous and mistrustful. He gave orders that only his guards should have access to the Castello and, probably to her great annoyance, moved Lucrezia from her beautifully decorated apartments in the castle to the rooms in the Corte she had occupied during his absence. Di Prosperi reported:
The principal cause I believe is because His Lordship wishes to restrict access to the Castle by anyone except the guards and it seems that he has moved the Lady to the rooms in the Corte – The Lord keeping for himself his camerini with the two camere dorate [gilded rooms] above the piazzetta of the Castello, from which he can come to the small salon with the balcony and the Sala Grande. However every day he changes his mind but he has told Madonna that she cannot at the moment enjoy her beautiful Rooms and princely apartments which she had had decorated (and was still having done) and on which have been spent thousands of ducats.
As a show of force Alfonso held a review of his light horse and a new display of men-at-arms.
Still Francesco Gonzaga held out, refusing to return Giulio; Sigismondo d’Este and Costabili, now reinforced by Niccolò da Correggio with twenty-five crossbowmen, failed to persuade him to hand over Giulio and, after a blazing row, returned to Ferrara empty-handed. Gonzaga continued to demand humane treatment for Giulio and also for Ferrante, although, as Bacchelli remarks, the latter did not even have the excuse of bad treatment by Ippolito for his treachery. In Ferrara, however, the courtiers besieged Alfonso with advice as to how the prisoners should be punished, Antonio Costabili pointing out that in ancient Rome traitors were put in a sack with animals and thrown into the Tiber. Alfonso, however, promised Gonzaga that neither Giulio nor Ferrante should be personally harmed but that they would be imprisoned. Meanwhile, in the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome, Gian Cantore confessed to papal and Ferrarese commissaries that he had been drawn into the plot by the Este brothers: he had not yet been handed over. Alfonso expelled the Boschetti family from their castle of San Cesario; in Mantua the unfortunate Boschetti daughter was forced into a convent. Giulio, now confined to his room in the castle at Mantua, his goods confiscated, had written a grovelling letter of apology to Alfonso, excusing his treachery by blaming Ippolito’s attack on him and Alfonso’s apparent alliance with the cardinal, an excuse unlikely to further his cause. Moreover, Ippolito was enraged by any attempt to lay blame upon him and was working cunningly behind the scenes to cover his tracks, even to the extent of instructing Ariosto, now his employee, not to mention the part he had played in the eclogue which Ariosto was writing about the Congiura.
Alfonso was determined to lay his hands on Giulio, and Francesco Gonzaga could no longer hold out. On 6 September, with two hundred light horse, crossbowmen and stradiots (the dreaded Albanian light cavalry brought to Italy by the Venetians), he arrived in Ferrara en route to meet Julius II, whose Gonfalonier he had been appointed, at Urbino preparatory to the campaign against the Bentivoglio. On the day of his arrival he was escorted by Alfonso to see Lucrezia in the Camera de la Stufa Grande where she was then lodged. He spent two days in the city, lodged in the Palazzo del Corte, leaving on the 8th. Giulio, in chains, was handed over to Alfonso’s representative in Mantua on Isabella’s orders on 9 September and taken the next day to Ferrara by the brothers Masino and Girolamo del Forno, trusted henchmen of Alfonso and Ippolito. He was imprisoned in the deepest dungeon in the Torre dei Leoni and shackled. He was only twenty-six years old.
The grisly punishment of the non-Este conspirators took place publicly: they were taken on a wagon from the castle to a tribune in the piazza where the process against them was read out. Franceschino da Rubiera was the first to suffer. Blindfolded, stunned with the executioner’s axe and kicked as he lay on the floor, he was then dragged to a block, decapitated and then quartered. Boschetti and Gherardo suffered the same fate. Their heads were placed on lances on the tower of the Palazzo della Ragione, their butchered body parts above three gates of the city. On 8 October, Ferrante and Giulio were sentenced to death but pardoned by Alfonso and imprisoned in rooms on two floors of the Torre dei Leoni. Finally, Gian Cantore was brought to Ferrara, seated on a horse with his hands tied behind him and his feet bound together under the horse’s stomach. Before him rode the executioner, holding a rope tied round the singer’s neck, and as he was led through the streets the populace spat in his face, pulled out his beard and aimed blows at his ribs. He was imprisoned in the Castello until 6 January 1507, Epiphany, when he was put in an iron cage suspended halfway up the Torre dei Leoni. Dressed in thin rags, shivering in the cold, icy wind, he remained there subsisting on bread and wine until the night of the 13th when either he hanged himself or was hanged by his gaolers. His body was then stripped and dragged by the heels through the streets behind a cart, to be hung by the feet from the bridge of Castel Tedaldo above the Po, the same bridge by which Lucrezia had entered the city.
As far as the Este family was concerned, the story was over. Giulio and Ferrante were kept imprisoned in the Torre dei Leoni while court life went on as if they had never existed. Their goods were handed over to Alfonso’s favourites with Niccolò da Correggio receiving the prize of Giulio’s magnificent palazzo on the Via degli Angeli. Ferrante died in prison in February 1540, aged sixty-three, after spending thirty-four years without a visit from any of his family. Giulio was released by Alfonso’s grandson, Alfonso II, on his accession, after fifty-three years’ imprisonment. Aged eighty-one, Giulio emerged to astound the people of Ferrara, still dandified and, according to the chroniclers, ‘a most handsome man’ but a figure from the past with a long beard and clothes which had been made for him in the fashion of fifty years ago.
Julius II, meanwhile, had revived Alexander VI’s campaign to bring the Papal States under the control of the Church. The
Bentivoglio of Bologna, who had only escaped being taken over by Cesare in the name of the Church by very substantial bribes, were now a prime target. They were deprived of their status as papal vicars of the city, which was excommunicated as long as they remained there. On 14 October 1506, a copy of the papal interdict against Bologna had been nailed to the door of the cathedral in Ferrara. Under its terms anyone who killed a Bolognese would be granted remission of his sin and a papal indulgence, as well as the goods of his victim. Any priest who failed to leave Bologna would forfeit his benefices. The author of this Christian document, the belligerent, bibulous Julius II, was on his way north; having already received the submission of Gian Paolo Baglioni of Perugia, he was approaching Imola with his army which included Francesco Gonzaga. The Bentivoglio family had already been excommunicated. Alfonso and Ippolito, who were related by marriage to the Bentivoglio and who had already outraged the Pope by their treatment of his godson, Ferrante, hastened to Imola to pay reverence to him. On 28 October a relieved Lucrezia wrote to Alfonso to tell him of her delight at hearing he had been well received there by the Pope and cardinals. He was not, however, prepared to participate totally in the humiliation of his friends and on his return to Ferrara on 3 November he issued a proclamation to the effect that anyone who had taken cattle and other animals from a Bolognese should register them with the Giudice dei Savi on pain of payment of a fine or, if not, tracti de corda. (This particularly painful torture involved tying the victim’s arms behind his back, then hoisting him up by cords tied around his wrists, thus dislocating his shoulders.) He also refused the Pope’s invitation to accompany him on his triumphal entry into Bologna.
The Bentivoglio had scattered before the Pope’s advance; Alfonso diplomatically retired to Belriguardo and Ostellato en route for Comacchio on 9 November, shortly before the arrival that afternoon of his half-sister Lucrezia Bentivoglio and her children, as refugees in Ferrara. Lucrezia, too, kept her at arm’s length, as di Prosperi told Isabella on 12 November: ‘Yesterday evening the Most Illustrious Madonna Lucretia [Bentivoglio] was to have been taken to see the Duchess, but Her Excellency was celebrating the feast of St Martin with the Cardinal and Messer Sigismondo and others.’ That day with Niccolò da Correggio she received her half-sister-in-law for a lengthy conversation which, however, di Prosperi noted acidly, did not appear to have been of great consolation to Lucrezia Bentivoglio: ‘I did not see her return to her lodging more comforted than before, not so much for her adversities, but for reasons I cannot write: Your Ladyship, I believe, will hear of this from her . . .’ Lucrezia Bentivoglio’s mother-in-law and sister-in-law arrived that day and lodged outside the city walls. They were clearly not invited in. Ippolito had not seen his half-sister Lucrezia since her arrival although he had called and been told that she was at table. Some of the leading noblewomen of the town had visited her but it was clear the ruling family could not risk incurring the Pope’s wrath and possible excommunication by harbouring his enemies. On 11 November, Julius II made his formal entry into Bologna.
Meanwhile, what of Lucrezia in all these Este family affairs? Apart from a brief intervention when she had been warned off by Alfonso, she seems to have kept herself apart, although undoubtedly aware of what was going on. Only one letter of that year from her to Alfonso has survived—assuming that there were more —and that, dated from Ferrara on 28 October, when the Congiura and its attendant horrors were over, refers to her pleasure at hearing from him of the good reception he and Ippolito had received from Julius II at Imola, where the warrior pope was on his way north to take Bologna. There is not one letter from her to Ippolito but since they were together in Ferrara for much of that year it is understandable. There are many letters to Francesco Gonzaga, some of them via trusted messengers such as Tebaldeo, Alberto Pio da Carpi and Hector Berlinguer, who transmitted her messages orally. Others, more explicit, were mainly of an administrative nature: requests for clemency for various subjects, asking him to take action concerning the reduction of water to their lands in Carpesana and their subjects there, caused by the construction of a watermill by a Mantuan citizen on the canal leading to their mills. She repeated Alfonso’s request to him to return the situation to what it had previously been. She was a passionate defender of the interests of her citizens and friends; she took up the cause of one Messer Amato Cusatro, who had suffered greatly from losing Gonzaga’s esteem and was now being unjustly persecuted by the podestà of Sermide in consequence: ‘I pray with all my heart that Your Lordship will not deny me this favour, because the love that I bear Messer Amato is such that I would hold any injury done to him as if it were to my own person, having found him a rare and affectionate servant to my Illustrious consort and myself . . .’ In December she wrote in her own hand asking Francesco to favour Ercole Strozzi: ‘Your Lordship knows that affection I bear to Messer Hercule Strozza [sic] and the obligations I have to him for his singular virtues and merit. He is coming to ask you a favour, as he will explain to you. I recommend him with all my heart and pray you that you will for love of me do for Messer Hercule as I am sure you would do for myself, because for the reasons I have referred to no less do I desire his wellbeing and ease than my own: whatever favour you will do him I will receive as done to me . . .’
Angela Borgia’s up-and-down erotic career appeared finally to have reached a happy conclusion, despite her contrary mother-in-law. In June, di Prosperi reported that Alessandro Pio had appeared in Ferrara and ‘remarried’ Angela. Early in December, he wrote to Isabella that Angela had had a row with her husband over a golden robe which she wanted and which he told her should be paid for out of her dowry. This quarrel was resolved: a few days later she was ceremonially accompanied to the rented house she was to share with her husband, in a carriage with Lucrezia and attended by Alfonso, Ippolito and all the court on horseback ‘to the sound of trumpets’. She was dressed in brocade, richly adorned and her fine carriage covered with satin striped with black velvet which, di Prosperi gossiped, had ‘cost her dowry but little’. There was a collation with plates of sugar confections, supper and dancing.
For Lucrezia, the great event of that extraordinary year was the news which reached her in the last week of November that Cesare was at liberty again. On the night of 25 October, he had made a dramatic escape from La Mota, injuring himself quite severely when the rope down which he was climbing was cut from above, precipitating him into the fosse. He made for Navarre and the court of his brother-in-law, Jean d’Albret, taking a tortuous route to evade capture, and reaching Pamplona on 3 December. Somewhere along the way he managed to get word to Lucrezia, who learned of his escape on 26 November and wrote immediately to Gonzaga, expecting him to share her joy. By the end of December, Lucrezia had learned where he was from his chancellor, Federico, whom she sent on to Gonzaga with the happy news and a letter from Cesare. (Cesare had also written to Ippolito; he did not, significantly, write to Alfonso.) ‘I am sure,’ Lucrezia wrote disingenuously, ‘that this [news] will make you rejoice and you will derive from it as much contentment as does the Duke [Cesare] . . . loving him as you do as a brother . . .’5
One other important person certainly did not share her joy: Julius II, now triumphantly ensconced in Bologna. As Federico passed through Bologna, the Pope had him seized. Lucrezia was distraught and wrote to Gonzaga asking him to intercede with Julius for his release, assuring him that Cesare intended no harm to the Pope, nor would she have allowed Federico to engage in any such activity, ‘being a most devoted and faithful servant to His Beatitude together with my consort. I know that he is not here for anything other than to give me the news of his [Cesare’s] liberation.’ Such a detention could only do harm to her brother and herself, giving the impression that they were not in the Pope’s good graces, therefore she begged Francesco to obtain Federico’s speedy release. In fact Julius had little to fear from Cesare. Although il Valentino still signed his letters ‘Cesar Borgia de Francia, duca di Romagna’, these were but empty words. As Julius himself
sneered, Cesare now had ‘not one rampart in the Romagna’. He was practically penniless: Julius had sequestrated the money which his bankers had distributed around the leading Italian banks, and the treasure which Florence and the Bentivoglio had captured. Louis XII had refused his request for the restitution of his duchy of Valentinois and his offer to take service with him once again. Yet where the charismatic, driven Cesare was concerned you could never be sure that he was finished. As Ferdinand of Aragon’s chronicler Zurita wrote, the news of his escape ‘put the Pope in great consternation, because the Duke was such a man that only his presence was sufficient to raise new troubles in all Italy: and he was greatly loved, not only by the soldiery, but also by many people of Tuscany and the States of the Church’.6 And in Ferrara he had his loyal and loving sister who would do anything to help him.
13. ‘Horrors and Tears’
Lucrezia Borgia Page 30