Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  VALENTINOIS: Panthasilea! Panthasilea!

  He catches her in his arms, as she staggers in danger of falling.

  [All rise, save GUIDO, who remains seated, his head in his hands, utterly crushed, almost insensible.

  [VALENTINOIS raves wildly on, his whole manner changed to reflect the sudden revulsion in his soul.

  VALENTINOIS: Lea! The wine was poisoned, and you knew it. You drained the cup to save me. Lea!

  [She breathes hard in his arms, but makes no answer. Holding her, he swings to his Swiss, and with one hand points to SINIBALDI.

  VALENTINOIS: Seize me that Venetian dog! Make him fast!

  [SINIBALDI attempts to draw his dagger. But his arms are instantly seized by CORELLA and RAMIREZ, who are on either side of him. They promptly disarm him, and surrender him to the Swiss, who have leapt forward.

  VALENTINOIS: Ah! You show an odd readiness to handle steel, now that your poison has missed its mark.

  SINIBALDI: Highness, I protest against this violence!

  CAPELLO: (in flabby agitation): As do I, magnificent, in the name of the Most Serene.

  VALENTINOIS: Cease, fool! Do you bleat your threats at me?

  [Half carrying, half supporting PANTHASILEA, VALENTINOIS conducts her to the chair right of table, lately vacated by SINIBALDI. He stands looking at her in anguish a moment.

  SINIBALDI: Your exalted potency is overlooking something, I think. I am an ambassador, and my person is inviolable. I am Prince Sinibaldi, Envoy of Venice.

  VALENTINOIS: (frenziedly): If you were Prince Lucifer, Envoy of Hell, you should still pay for this.

  SINIBALDI: Your potency dares to say that I...

  VALENTINOIS: Fool! Will you prevaricate upon the very threshold of Eternity? For that is where you stand...Unless you can repair what you have done...Your life for hers. That is my offer. Give me the antidote — the antidote to your Venetian poison, and you shall have your filthy life.

  [PANTHASILEA, moved by his passionate frenzy, looks up; and though her laboured breathing shows her extremity, she smiles.

  SINIBALDI: I have no antidote. I know nothing of poison — if poison it be by which she is stricken. As for your threats — for any violence to me, you will be called to render a strict account to Venice.

  VALENTINOIS: (in a voice of thunder): And I will render it. But though her legions were already at my gates, though my ruin were assured, I should not spare you now.

  CAPELLO: In Heaven’s name, magnificent!

  VALENTINOIS: (heedlessly, indicating Sinibaldi): Take him away! Give him a priest, and then a rope and so, let him face his Maker.

  SINIBALDI: You seal your own doom with mine.

  VALENTINOIS: Take him away! You have my orders.

  [The SWISS lead SINIBALDI up and out.

  CAPELLO: (quavering) Highness! Highness! Bethink you! This will mean war.

  VALENTINOIS: I’ll welcome it. Begone! Micheletto, clear the room. Sirs, you have leave to go! Ramirez, a doctor! Bestir, man! Quick! in Heaven’s name!

  [RAMIREZ plunges out, the ambassadors following. CORELLA touches GUIDO’S shoulder. The latter rises, looks wildly round, and turns as if to go towards PANTHASILEA. VALENTINOIS waves him back.

  VALENTINOIS: Go, sir! Go! You are her father. I will not ask what part you had in this. But go.

  [GUIDO goes out L. with CORELLA.

  [VALENTINOIS turns again to PANTHASILEA, who is leaning back with closed eyes. He kneels beside her.

  VALENTINOIS: Lea! Lea! Speak to me, Lea!

  [She opens her eyes, considers his grief-stricken face, and smiles wistfully.

  PANTHASILEA: My lord!

  VALENTINOIS: O God of Heaven! Where is now my boasted might? I would give all that I have won at so much cost for just the power to stay your ebbing life. Lea, forgive! Had I but known, had I but dreamed your worth...

  PANTHASILEA: I was the agent of a vile betrayal, and you knew me to be that. But I have made amends...

  VALENTINOIS: Amends! Oh! (In a sudden frenzy, leaping up.) Where is this doctor? Will he never come?

  PANTHASILEA: Let be. There is no doctor that can help me now.

  VALENTINOIS: Lea! My poor murdered love!

  PANTHASILEA: (eagerly): Say that again, my lord...Say that again!

  VALENTINOIS: My love! My love!

  PANTHASILEA: (smiling): So you have come to love me a little at the last I am content, Valentinois. Do you remember how I begged in vain last night that you should speak that little word that would have healed my shame? You would not. You would not lie. So if you say it now...it must be true.

  VALENTINOIS: If it could avail I would give my life to prove it. Why have I found you but to lose you again? You drank that poisoned wine to save me — me! Why?

  PANTHASILEA: The lust of the conquest! To hear you say what you have said.

  VALENTINOIS: Was so much needed to accomplish that?

  PANTHASILEA: It was. You deemed me just a treacherous wanton. How else could I give proof? Would anything less have made you believe in me? Would anything less have conquered you?

  VALENTINOIS: It is a conquest that must break me if you leave me now. (He takes her up in his arms. He holds her now, crushing her to him.) Stay with me, Lea — O pitying Heaven! — stay!

  PANTHASILEA: Thus did I plead with you last night, as passionately and as vainly. Thus did I beg you to stay. You would not then, and now I...I cannot.

  [He kisses her. She smiles.

  PANTHASILEA: But this time...we part...friends...lovers...(On a sudden alarmed outcry.) Valentinois!

  VALENTINOIS: Lea!

  PANTHASILEA: It is growing dark...It...

  [A long fluttering sigh escapes her. She makes a convulsive movement. Her head falls back. She is dead.

  [A moment he holds her yet. Then gently he lowers her into the chair again.

  [He kneels beside her. He speaks in a suffocated voice.

  VALENTINOIS: Ay, you have conquered now!

  [A sob bursts from him. His head sinks on to the arm he is resting on the table’s edge.

  [A trumpet is heard in the distance, and faintly thereafter the sound of march music.

  SLOW CURTAIN

  END OF PLAY

  The Non-Fiction

  An avid skier, Sabatini made an annual visit to the town of Adelboden, Switzerland.

  THE LIFE OF CESARE BORGIA

  This non-fiction work was first published in 1912. It is a biography of fifteenth-century Italian politician, Cesare Borgia — whose ruthless political machinations were a major influence on Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532). Sabatini’s account relates the complex plots and intrigues that make up Borgia’s career at court, but is also something of a defence of the man who, traditionally, is held to be one of the most evil in the history of Italy.

  Title page of an early edition

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  BOOK I. THE HOUSE OF THE BULL

  CHAPTER I. THE RISE OF THE HOUSE OF BORGIA

  CHAPTER II. THE REIGNS OF SIXTUS IV AND INNOCENT VIII

  CHAPTER III. ALEXANDER VI

  CHAPTER IV. BORGIA ALLIANCES

  BOOK II. THE BULL PASCANT

  CHAPTER I. THE FRENCH INVASION

  CHAPTER II. THE POPE AND THE SUPERNATURAL

  CHAPTER III. THE ROMAN BARONS

  CHAPTER IV. THE MURDER OF THE DUKE OF GANDIA

  CHAPTER V. THE RENUNCIATION OF THE PURPLE

  BOOK III. THE BULL RAMPANT

  CHAPTER I. THE DUCHESS OF VALENTINOIS

  CHAPTER II. THE KNELL OF THE TYRANTS

  CHAPTER III. IMOLA AND FORLI

  CHAPTER IV. GONFALONIER OF THE CHURCH

  CHAPTER V. THE MURDER OF ALFONSO OF ARAGON

  CHAPTER VI. RIMINI AND PESARO

  CHAPTER VII. THE SIEGE OF FAENZA

  CHAPTER VIII. ASTORRE MANFREDI

  CHAPTER IX. CASTEL BOLOGNESE AND PIOMBINO

  CHAPTER X. THE END OF THE HOUSE OF ARAGON

  CHAPTER XI. THE LETTE
R TO SILVIO SAVELLI

  CHAPTER XII. LUCREZIA’S THIRD MARRIAGE

  CHAPTER XIII. URBINO AND CAMERINO

  CHAPTER XIV. THE REVOLT OF THE CONDOTTIERI

  CHAPTER XV. MACCHIAVELLI’S LEGATION

  CHAPTER XVI. RAMIRO DE LORQUA

  CHAPTER XVII. “THE BEAUTIFUL STRATAGEM”

  CHAPTER XVIII. THE ZENITH

  BOOK IV. THE BULL CADENT

  CHAPTER I. THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER VI

  CHAPTER II. PIUS III

  CHAPTER III. JULIUS II

  CHAPTER IV. ATROPOS

  Cesare Borgia (c. 1475–1507)

  PREFACE

  This is no Chronicle of Saints. Nor yet is it a History of Devils. It is a record of certain very human, strenuous men in a very human, strenuous age; a lustful, flamboyant age; an age red with blood and pale with passion at white-heat; an age of steel and velvet, of vivid colour, dazzling light and impenetrable shadow; an age of swift movement, pitiless violence and high endeavour, of sharp antitheses and amazing contrasts.

  To judge it from the standpoint of this calm, deliberate, and correct century — as we conceive our own to be — is for sedate middle-age to judge from its own standpoint the reckless, hot, passionate, lustful humours of youth, of youth that errs grievously and achieves greatly.

  So to judge that epoch collectively is manifestly wrong, a hopeless procedure if it be our aim to understand it and to be in sympathy with it, as it becomes broad-minded age to be tolerantly in sympathy with the youth whose follies it perceives. Life is an ephemeral business, and we waste too much of it in judging where it would beseem us better to accept, that we ourselves may come to be accepted by such future ages as may pursue the study of us.

  But if it be wrong to judge a past epoch collectively by the standards of our own time, how much more is it not wrong to single out individuals for judgement by those same standards, after detaching them for the purpose from the environment in which they had their being? How false must be the conception of them thus obtained! We view the individuals so selected through a microscope of modern focus. They appear monstrous and abnormal, and we straight-way assume them to be monsters and abnormalities, never considering that the fault is in the adjustment of the instrument through which we inspect them, and that until that is corrected others of that same past age, if similarly viewed, must appear similarly distorted.

  Hence it follows that some study of an age must ever prelude and accompany the study of its individuals, if comprehension is to wait upon our labours. To proceed otherwise is to judge an individual Hottentot or South Sea Islander by the code of manners that obtains in Belgravia or Mayfair.

  Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it; and in the literature of the Cinquecento you shall behold for the looking the ardent, unmoral, naïve soul of this Renaissance that was sprawling in its lusty, naked infancy and bellowing hungrily for the pap of knowledge, and for other things. You shall infer something of the passionate mettle of this infant: his tempestuous mirth, his fierce rages, his simplicity, his naïveté, his inquisitiveness, his cunning, his deceit, his cruelty, his love of sunshine and bright gewgaws.

  To realize him as he was, you need but to bethink you that this was the age in which the Decamerone of Giovanni Boccaccio, the Facetiae of Poggio, the Satires of Filelfo, and the Hermaphroditus of Panormitano afforded reading-matter to both sexes. This was the age in which the learned and erudite Lorenzo Valla — of whom more anon — wrote his famous indictment of virginity, condemning it as against nature with arguments of a most insidious logic. This was the age in which Casa, Archbishop of Benevento, wrote a most singular work of erotic philosophy, which, coming from a churchman’s pen, will leave you cold with horror should you chance to turn its pages. This was the age of the Discovery of Man; the pagan age which stripped Christ of His divinity to bestow it upon Plato, so that Marsilio Ficino actually burnt an altar-lamp before an image of the Greek by whose teachings — in common with so many scholars of his day — he sought to inform himself.

  It was an age that had become unable to discriminate between the merits of the Saints of the Church and the Harlots of the Town. Therefore it honoured both alike, extolled the carnal merits of the one in much the same terms as were employed to extol the spiritual merits of the other. Thus when a famous Roman courtesan departed this life in the year 1511, at the early age of twenty-six, she was accorded a splendid funeral and an imposing tomb in the Chapel Santa Gregoria with a tablet bearing the following inscription:

  “IMPERIA CORTISANA ROMANA QUAE DIGNA TANTO NOMINE, RARAE INTER MORTALES FORMAE SPECIMEN DEDIT.”

  It was, in short, an age so universally immoral as scarcely to be termed immoral, since immorality may be defined as a departure from the morals that obtain a given time and in a given place. So that whilst from our own standpoint the Cinquecento, taken collectively, is an age of grossest licence and immorality, from the standpoint of the Cinquecento itself few of its individuals might with justice be branded immoral.

  For the rest, it was an epoch of reaction from the Age of Chivalry: an epoch of unbounded luxury, of the cult and worship of the beautiful externally; an epoch that set no store by any inward virtue, by truth or honour; an epoch that laid it down as a maxim that no inconvenient engagement should be kept if opportunity offered to evade it.

  The history of the Cinquecento is a history developed in broken pledges, trusts dishonoured and basest treacheries, as you shall come to conclude before you have read far in the story that is here to be set down.

  In a profligate age what can you look for but profligates? Is it just, is it reasonable, or is it even honest to take a man or a family from such an environment, for judgement by the canons of a later epoch? Yet is it not the method that has been most frequently adopted in dealing with the vast subject of the Borgias?

  To avoid the dangers that must wait upon that error, the history of that House shall here be taken up with the elevation of Calixtus III to the Papal Throne; and the reign of the four Popes immediately preceding Roderigo Borgia — who reigned as Alexander VI — shall briefly be surveyed that a standard may be set by which to judge the man and the family that form the real subject of this work.

  The history of this amazing Pope Alexander is yet to be written. No attempt has been made to exhaust it here. Yet of necessity he bulks large in these pages; for the history of his dazzling, meteoric son is so closely interwoven with his own that it is impossible to present the one without dealing at considerable length with the other.

  The sources from which the history of the House of Borgia has been culled are not to be examined in a preface. They are too numerous, and they require too minute and individual a consideration that their precise value and degree of credibility may be ascertained. Abundantly shall such examination be made in the course of this history, and in a measure as the need arises to cite evidence for one side or for the other shall that evidence be sifted.

  Never, perhaps, has anything more true been written of the Borgias and their history than the matter contained in the following lines of Rawdon Brown in his Ragguagli sulla Vita e sulle Opere di Marino Sanuto: “It seems to me that history has made use of the House of Borgia as of a canvas upon which to depict the turpitudes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”

  Materials for the work were very ready to the hand; and although they do not signally differ from the materials out of which the histories of half a dozen Popes of the same epoch might be compiled, they are far more abundant in the case of the Borgia Pope, for the excellent reason that the Borgia Pope detaches from the background of the Renaissance far more than any of his compeers by virtue of his importance as a political force.

  In this was reason to spare for his being libelled and lampooned even beyond the usual extravagant wont. Slanders concerning him and his son Cesare were readily circulated, and they will generally be found to spring f
rom those States which had most cause for jealousy and resentment of the Borgia might — Venice, Florence, and Milan, amongst others.

  No rancour is so bitter as political rancour — save, perhaps, religious rancour, which we shall also trace; no warfare more unscrupulous or more prone to use the insidious weapons of slander than political warfare. Of this such striking instances abound in our own time that there can scarce be the need to labour the point. And from the form taken by such slanders as are circulated in our own sedate and moderate epoch may be conceived what might be said by political opponents in a fierce age that knew no pudency and no restraint. All this in its proper place shall be more closely examined.

  For many of the charges brought against the House of Borgia some testimony exists; for many others — and these are the more lurid, sensational, and appalling covering as they do rape and murder, adultery, incest, and the sin of the Cities of the Plain — no single grain of real evidence is forthcoming. Indeed, at this time of day evidence is no longer called for where the sins of the Borgias are concerned. Oft-reiterated assertion has usurped the place of evidence — for a lie sufficiently repeated comes to be credited by its very utterer. And meanwhile the calumny has sped from tongue to tongue, from pen to pen, gathering matter as it goes. The world absorbs the stories; it devours them greedily so they be sensational, and writers well aware of this have been pandering to that morbid appetite for some centuries now with this subject of the Borgias. A salted, piquant tale of vice, a ghastly story of moral turpitude and physical corruption, a hair-raising narrative of horrors and abominations — these are the stock-in-trade of the sensation-monger. With the authenticity of the matters he retails such a one has no concern. “Se non é vero é ben trovato,” is his motto, and in his heart the sensation-monger — of whatsoever age — rather hopes the thing be true. He will certainly make his public so believe it; for to discredit it would be to lose nine-tenths of its sensational value. So he trims and adjusts his wares, adds a touch or two of colour and what else he accounts necessary to heighten their air of authenticity, to dissemble any peeping spuriousness.