by Michael Hone
The Orsini became so numerous that they formed branches spread out through all of Italy. Clarice Orsini wedded the de’ Medici Lorenzo Il Magnifico and became mother of Leo X. Francesco Orsini was garroted by Cesare Borgia. Beroaldo Orsini was made a prince of the Holy Roman Empre by Charles VI. Many Orsini were senators. Paolo Orsini strangled his wife Isabella, whose father was the very important head of Florence, Cosimo I (who commissioned Cellini’s Perseus, the story of which is in the Cellini chapter of this book). He went on to kill her cousin Leonora because she had witnessed Paolo strangling his wife. Servants had also witnessed the scene but simply declared that Isabella had been ‘’washing her hair one moment, and then was suddenly dead on her knees the next.’’ It’s thought that Paolo had found out about her liaison with her cousin Troilo Orsini. Paolo then went to Rome where he married Vittoria Peretti after first murdering her husband. Paolo ran off with a new mistress to Venice, leaving Vittoria behind. Vittoria was strangled by Ludovico Orsini, her heir and therefore next in line for her considerable fortune, thanks to the fact that Vittoria’s husband had taken sanctuary in Venice in order to avoid trials for his previous assassinations.
The Colonna were less reproductively proficient, but as condottieri they were just as fierce. Prospero and Fabrizio backed the invasion of Charles VIII, they blockaded Rome thanks to the tiny city-states they ruled that surrounded both the Eternal City and Naples, capable of cutting off food and water. They put aside their vendetta with the Orsini the time to fight Alexander VI and his highly capable and dangerous son Cesare, and many lost their lives in the effort. When it was in their interest to do so they double-crossed the French and allied themselves with the Spanish. They were imprisoned by Louis XII in the Neapolitan Castel Nuovo, excommunicated by Alexander and then they joined the great Spanish general Gonzago (Gonzalo Fernandez) who rid Naples of Louis. With the death of Alexander they recovered the territories he had added to the Papal States. Prospero’s wife betrayed him with his best friend, but he kept his morale up enough to defeat the French king François I.
Fabrizio’s daughter Vittoria formed a long and exclusive relationship with Michelangelo, to whom the great artist sent drawings and wrote sonnets, the only woman of importance to him other than is mother. Constanza Colonna was present at the wedding of Caravaggio’s father and gave support to the unequalled painter throughout his entire life, providing hideouts when he fled from danger. Her son Fabrizio Colonna even provided the ship that took Caravaggio to Malta, and the ship that sprung him from his island imprisonment and took him to Sicily. She was the greatest feminine influence in the artist’s life.
Most Orsini and Colonna were murderers, as were the Borgia, the Borghese and the Farnese, also described in this book, but as individuals, not families.
MACHIAVELLI
1469 - 1527
A new Venetian ambassador was sent to the Vatican, Antonio Giustinian, a man of great importance to us because we are informed about much that follows thanks to the thousands of letters he wrote and sent throughout Europe. Around this time too Florence sent a delegation to Cesare Borgia who had just taken Urbino, in order to both calm the young man’s ardors for conquest and to get his support in maintaining Florence’s authority over Pisa and Arezzo. The delegation consisted of Francesco Soderini, the brother of the courant head of Florence, and a new man destined to leave his mark on the world, Niccolò Machiavelli. Niccolò Machiavelli served Cesare Borgia, which allowed him an eyewitness-view of ruthless government, the basis of his masterpiece The Prince, the very foundation of today’s political science. We don’t know to what extent Michiavelli carried on male-to-male relations during his adult life, but thanks to Michael Rocke and his wonderful book Forbidden Friendships we have this response from Machiavelli to the letter sent to him by a childhood friend who is worried about his son’s frequentations, proof of Machiavelli’s appreciation of boys during his own adolescence: ‘’Since we are verging on old age, we might be severe and overly scrupulous, and we do not remember what we did as adolescents. So Lodovico has a boy with him, with whom he amuses himself, jests, takes walks, growls in his ear, goes to bed together. What then? Even in these things perhaps there is nothing bad.’’ (Growls in his ear: I adore that!)
Machiavelli is also said to have exclaimed: ‘’In your house there are no young boys and women to fuck. What kind of a fucking house is that?’’
Machiavelli on Cesare: ‘’He was the handsomest man of his times.’’
Few other times in history were more tumultuous than those known to Machiavelli. Just the mention of names such as the Visconti, the Sforza, the Borgia, Charles VIII, the warrior pope Julius II, the Turks brought instant fear to the hearts of men. Battles between the city-states continued without ever a respite. Quarrels between the Medici and their fellow citizens led to the assassination of Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano by the Pazzi. Religious unrest caused by the likes of Savonarola, and the miserable decadence of Pope Alexander VI, caused riots and turmoil. Privileged youths such as Cesare and his brothers--and nearly every other boy-delinquent of noble blood--were free to kill, maim and rape. Condottieri were encouraged to augment their wages by destroying villages, towns and cities, and to assuage their lust on girls and women. To these inflictions can be added disease and plague--so terrible that noble families farmed out their children until around age seven, the age at which they were allowed to return home had they survived the various ailments of the times. The peaceable Machiavelli himself was tortured by the usually civilized Medici--with the strappado, a torture in five degrees. In the first the prisoner’s hands were tired behind his back and he was advised to confess. If he refused, his arms were raised behind his back by a rope attached to a pulley. During this second degree he was lifted off his feet for a short time. If he still refused to confess he faced the third degree, being raised until his arms dislocated. During the fourth degree he was violently jerked. During the last degree, more weights were added until his arms were torn from his body. Machiavelli went as far as the first degree, but as his purported crimes were few, he was let off. (We know nothing of the Medici accusations against Machiavelli.) He then retired from politics and in a letter to a friend he described a typical day of retirement as one in which he entered his study, wearing the formal dress of an ambassador, and there he discoursed with the popes, princes, kings and emperors of old, asking them questions and noting down their answers.
I’ve put Machiavelli in with murders because The Prince, over the centuries, may have inspired countless tyrants to follow his advice, and perhaps still does. He is therefore the instigator--behind daggers, swords, harquebusiers, garrotes, poisons--of countless murders.
FRANCISCO PIZARRO
1471 – 1541
There was something remarkable about the presence of Pizarro that brought respect from one of the most eminent monarchs to have lived, Charles V, as well as an intense interest from the Count of Osorno, the person who would decide if Pizarro were to be given permission to field the forces necessary for the conquest of the huge territories and incalculable wealth of the lands of Peru, lands discovered a mere seven years before by Pascual de Andagoya. Charles and Osorno had before them a man of great height, modest, levelheaded, thoughtful, peasant-like in bearing and totally analphabet.
Reportedly wealthy from the slave trade, a trade so cruel that only a man with a heart of stone could exercise it, he and several associates paid for the expedition to Peru, an area infinitely larger than today, promising Charles the time-honored royal fifth, receiving in return a knighthood. Like Napoleon centuries later who would replace land grants and gifts of money with medals and ribbons, a knighthood was decidedly little in comparison to the riches Charles would receive in return.
Pizarro went to the village of his birth to recruit 150 men. He would get 17, two of whom were mere boys, both age 15, Pedro Pizarro, a relative, and Alonso de Meda, Pizarro’s page. Both boys would survive the terrible ordeals awaiting them, and both would return, liv
e full lives, and die, among loved ones, in their beds. With his new recruits Pizarro sailed to Panama to enlist additional men needed for his expedition.
Waiting for him on the other side of the Atlantic was Atahualpa whose priests had forewarned him of the coming of bearded white gods. Atahualpa had taken power from a younger brother by massacring him and his sister-wife and the tens of thousands who had supported him, many of whom had been impaled, this during the lifetime of Machiavelli who would have approved, as he insisted on a leader ridding himself of his brothers and relatives.
Pizarro’s men said of him that they knew of none stronger and more determined in his tasks than he. Atahualpa, then 27, was himself fearless and indomitable, the head of a nation of 12,000,000. How Pizarro, around age 55 (we don’t know precisely when he was born), brought the Incas to their knees, he at the head of a mere 200, is something I can’t get my head around. If this unique feat in the history of mankind were not enough, in Mexico Cortés did even better.
Hernando de Soto, 31, his earlobes adorned with pearls and his armor laced with gold, joined Pizarro with two ships and a mistress, Juana, the first Spanish woman in South America. Pizarro had promised de Soto the captaincy of his troops in exchange for the ships, but he now changed his mind, as he wanted total command himself. This would not be his first betrayal. Pizarro’s half-brother Hernando, 20 years younger, was also present. The most literate member of a family, whose father was said to have produced bastard sons without number, Hernando could read and write. He would eventually return to Spain laden with enough gold to establish his family fortune.
Also present was Diego de Trujillo, 24, who would, 40 years later, write a history of the expedition. Pedro Pizarro, the boy only 15, would also contribute to our knowledge.
The trip inland was one of massacre and total absence of any form of humanity. Spaniards caught by Indians were cut to pieces, Indians were killed or enslaved, and those unwilling to serve the Spaniards were garroted before the others as a warning. Women were raped and then slaughtered, precursors of later snuff films, while during this time, in Spain, theologians debated whether the Indians were even human. In addition, civil war among Atahualpa’s peoples left hundreds of thousands dead, strewn wherever the Spanish went, many sacrificed. The first sight of gold on the dead, strands of gold woven into clothes, rendered the Spanish wild optimism, something noted by the Indians hiding unseen, and reported to their emperor.
Guides were found who took Pizarro to Atahualpa’s camp in the high Andes. The Spanish went through the cordillera, at times in single file, over reed bridges so precarious that they crossed on hands and knees, the silence broken by the occasional screams of a man falling to his death into the ravines thousands of feet below. The cold was so intense that some froze to death during the nights, while others were encouraged by their Indian guides to chew coca leaves to lessen their misery.
They came upon Atahualpa in a lush valley where he was encamped among 40,000 Incas. Every schoolboy knows the story of the emperor, seated on a litter carried by his men, the emperor who, when offered a bible by a priest, examined the strange writing within before throwing it to the ground. He gave the order to finish off the Spaniards, but Pizarro acted first, charging the litter, hacking off the arms of the carriers who sought to support their emperor aloft on their shoulders and what remained of the stumps of their arms. Atahualpa fell and was taken prisoner while his men were slaughtered by the Spanish. 8,000 were said to have perished without the loss of a single Spaniard. The scene is wonderfully described in Stuart Stirling’s equally wonderful Pizarro – Conqueror of the Inca, a must-read for detailed descriptions of the conquest.
Pedro Pizarro, the fifteen-year-old, recounted this concerning Atahualpa, ‘’He had a fine character … his features were beautiful … his eyes bloodshot.’’ Pedro goes on to relate a horrifying incident. Atahualpa asked a boy to go off to one of his gardens for fruit. The boy took longer than was normally the case and returned shaking before Atahualpa who smiled at him and dismissed him with kindness, signaling as the boy left that his throat was to be slit just outside, in view of the emperor’s servants, as a warning. When Pedro marveled at one of Atahualpa cloaks, made from bat hair as fine as silk, Atahualpa asked Pedro, “What better things do the dogs my people have to do other than serve their father?’’.
The relationship between Atahualpa and Pizarro was one of necessity, in no way as amicable as that between Montezuma and Cortés who played games together, sailed side by side and laughed at each other’s foibles. Atahualpa did give Pizarro his sister, age 12, with whom the Spaniard immediately slept. From his cell Atahualpa continued to rule, ordering his rebellious brothers hunted down and killed, even drinking from one of their shrunken heads ‘’mounted in gold,’’ Stirling tells us. During the 8 months of imprisonment Atahualpa had two rooms filled with gold to a height of 12 feet each. Historians believe that much more gold than that came in, exquisite chef-d’oeuvres of the finest art, melted into ingots. The excess never became part of Charles’s royal fifth.
Hearing of gold elsewhere, Pizarro sent Hernando Pizarro to Patchacamac and de Soto to Cuzco to bring it in. They returned with wagon trains of the metal. Hernandez set sail for Spain with the royal fifth and the remainder for himself, the keystone of his wealth. What remained was distributed among the captains and the troops, enough for the rest of their days had most not gambled, whored and drunk it away.
The catalyst to Atahualpa’s death came when he found that one of his sister-wives had been taken by force by a Spanish guard. Atahualpa called the man scum but didn’t repeat the incident to Pizarro. The guard, fearing that the emperor would finish by betraying him, went to Pizarro and told him that he had overheard Atahualpa give orders for the destruction of the Spanish. Those not slaughtered would be castrated to serve the women (because a castrated man could nonetheless have an erection, his penis too was cut off). Other Spaniards would be sacrificed to the sun god.
Pizarro also knew that the Incas who had sided with him, a hundred thousand, wanted Atahualpa dead as assurance that he would not have them butchered.
Atahualpa was tried. Baptized. Given a christian name, Francisco, after Pizarro’s own. A chain encircled his neck and two men pulled, one on each side, until he was no more. He was then offered a christian burial. Atahualpa was no saint. No one in fact was. But perhaps I can be allowed to not capitalize the word christian.
A new emperor, Manco, was crowned, a boy who kneeled before Pizarro, called him Father, and pledged fealty. De Soto was given one of Atahualpa’s sister-wives who was baptized Doña Leanor. He later abandoned her to a destiny of dire poverty. The new emperor’s sister-wife was raped by Pizarro’s brother Gonzalo, prompting Manco to immediately escape. He was caught, locked in a prison with an iron around his neck. For weeks he was urinated and shat upon, his eyebrows were burned by candle flame, while he begged to be strangled. His other sister-wives, all of them, were passed out among the men. Stirling recounts that after gold, the greatest prize was women.
The infamy went on and on. The Aztec emperor’s sister-wife Cura Occllo was captured. She covered herself in excrement so as not to be violated. When she could excrete nothing more, the Spaniards had slaves clean her before she was gang-raped. Pizarro sent ambassadors to tell Manco that he could have his wife back if he made peace. Manco had the ambassadors butchered. Pizarro himself ordered Cura Ocllo used as a target for bow and arrow practice, a female Saint Sebastian.
Pizarro eventually ruled over incredibly vast lands. He brought wealth to his followers, most of who ended miserably. His brother Gonzalo Pizarro was beheaded for lèse-majesté for his role in the murder of one of Pizarro’s associates, Don Diego de Almargo, sent by the king himself to bring order to the conquered lands. Almagro had saved Pizarro’s life on several occasions by sending supplies and men when Pizarro had found himself in life-threatening situations, but they had had a falling out over control of the expedition, leading to Pizarro having him ga
rroted.
Pizarro’s young brother Juan was killed during the siege of Cuzco.
Pizarro was murdered by men sent by the son of Almargo, the man who had so often saved Pizarro’s life and had perhaps been his most loyal friend. Even in death, struck down by daggers in his own house, Pizarro was responsible for the death of others, that of his pages who came to defend him. He was 65.
The strangest destiny was reserved for Hernando Pizarro. Filthy rich thanks to his debarking from the New World with a boatload of treasure, he was imprisoned for his role in the garroting of Almargo. Although an old man and blind, he shared his 18-year imprisonment with a young girl, the daughter of a woman who had been an Inca princess. She bore him two sons and a daughter. When freed, he had a palace built for them both. At his death his young wife took a husband who was, in the tradition of Caterina Riario Sforza de’ Medici (see Astorre Manfredi), much younger than she, and with whom they dissipated the last of the Inca gold.
Francisco Pizarro
PERKIN
1474 – 1499
The story of Simnel and Perkin is as true as one can make it after half a millennium. It’s a passionate tale that involves five very lonely people: A boy who lost his father and his brother, and was himself purportedly assassinated at age 9: Richard, son of Edward IV. A tale of another lad, abandoned young to his destiny, whose love of beautiful clothes--a setting for his own beauty--would lead to the loss of his beautiful head, a lad born with the name Perkin. A woman, Margaret of Burgundy, wife of Charles the Bold and sister of King Edward IV and Richard III, whose only request of life was the birth of a baby she would never bear, but who found her consolation in adopting two other lads, two pretenders, Simnel and Perkin. A king, James of Scotland, whose father died in war and who spent his childhood seeking another. And, finally, a king marked by the loss of his father at an early age, a king who fought tooth and nail for a kingdom and won it thanks to the death of the boys in the Tower, King Henry VII.