Indeed Cesare, once again confident in himself and his future, seemed determined to enjoy life to the full in this summer of 1500. He had a beautiful mistress, a Florentine courtesan named Fiammetta de’ Michelis, who owned three houses in the city, including one on the piazza named after her near the Piazza Navona, and a country villa, or vigna, outside the Porta Viridaria. Fiammetta was typical of the rich courtesans of her day, called cortigiane honeste – ‘honest courtesans’ – to distinguish them from the poor prostitutes called cortigiane delle candelle, since they often worked out of candlemerchants’ shops. The poor whores ‘of the candles’ ended their lives begging for alms on church steps as soon as they lost their looks, and died as paupers in the Hospital of the Consolazione (Cesare’s one charitable endowment). The lives of the fashionable courtesans were very different. Pietro Aretino, who called Rome ‘a town of whores’, poked fun at the bogus intellectualism of the courtesans of the day, and in one of his plays a mother advised her daughter to advance herself in the profession by leaving fashionable books such as The Decameron and Petrarch lying about, and to hire some poor poet to ghost verses for her.
Fiammetta, apart from her other accomplishments, spoke Latin, declaimed Ovid and Petrarch from memory, and sang delightfully, accompanying herself on the lyre. No doubt she lived in circumstances of the utmost luxury, like the girl described by the Sienese Pietro Fortini, who sat ‘resembling a glittering sun with her splendid and rich clothes, her jewels and her golden chains’ in a room decorated with gilded leather and fine paintings, while her bedroom was hung with silk and had ‘a bed with superb curtains, a royal bedspread, and above all sheets so fine and white that they in truth seemed as thin, as fine, as white as the membrane of an egg’. The apartments of Imperia, Fiammetta’s contemporary, wrote Matteo Bandello, were so richly furnished that they might have belonged to a princess, and the Spanish ambassador who visited her there preferred to spit in the face of a servant rather than on the floor for fear of spoiling the magnificent carpets. Fiammetta and Imperia, mistress of Raphael’s patron Agostino Chigi, earned remission for their profitable sins by building themselves splendid memorial chapels in the fashionable church of San Agostino, frequented by their former friends and clients, the great cardinals, bankers, artists and humanists. Aretino, who saw Fiammetta’s chapel there after she died in 1512, remarked of her that ‘she made a beautiful end’. In fact little is known of Fiammetta beyond her relationship with Cesare, which was notorious to the extent that her will in the city archives was headed ‘the Testament of la Fiammetta of il Valentino’.
While the Romans gossiped about Cesare’s relationship with the lovely Fiammetta, they were amazed by his physical feats in public. The Venetian envoy Paolo Capello reported that at a bullfight held in the piazza of St Peter’s on 24 June he ‘killed seven wild bulls, fighting on horseback in the Spanish style, and he cut off the head of one with his first stroke, a thing which seemed great to all Rome’. But on Monday, 29 June, five days after his triumph in the arena, an accident occurred which was a vivid reminder to Cesare of the tenuous nature of his hold on power. At about five o’clock a violent storm struck the city in a tempest of rain, hail and whirlwinds. A chimney on the Vatican roof fell through the ceiling into a room, mortally injuring three people, including Lorenzo Chigi, brother of the famous Sienese banker. The floor collapsed into a room below where Alexander was seated on a dais conversing with Cardinal Lopez and his secret chamberlain Gaspara Poto. Lopez and Poto were hurrying to close the windows against a violent squall of rain when they heard a crash and the room filled with a cloud of dust; the dais where the Pope had been sitting was covered by a heap of fallen masonry. Panic-stricken, they called to the guards outside the door that the Pope was dead. The guards, showing more presence of mind, cleared away the rubble and found the Pope still sitting on his throne, unconscious but alive – a roof beam had saved him from the falling masonry. He had a bleeding wound on his head, bruises, and various cuts and scratches on his right hand and arm, but he was soon able to walk to the neighbouring chamber to be tended by his doctors.
Typically, Alexander’s first thought was for politics, and his son’s future; he sent for the Venetian ambassador Capello and dispatched a brief to the Venetian Signoria informing them of the accident. From his sickbed, where the ambassador found him devotedly nursed by Lucrezia and her ladies, one of whom he describes as ‘his favourite’, Alexander pressed Capello on the question of Rimini and Faenza, and above all for a Venetian condotta for Cesare. In France it was rumoured that the Pope was dead, and moves were made to gain the tiara for Giuliano della Rovere. Indeed, his father’s narrow escape from death can only have impressed Cesare the more with the urgency of carrying out his plans and securing his future. As the Florentine envoy Francesco Cappello wrote perspicaciously on 8 July: ‘Since the Pope is a man of seventy, similar shocks are considered dangerous … This illness will be the cause of il Valentino arranging his affairs with Venice by whatever means he can, because if the Pope died he is well aware that he would be in a very exposed position …’
Within just over a fortnight of the Pope’s accident a brutal attack on Lucrezia’s husband, Alfonso Bisceglie, focused a lurid light of speculation on Borgia family relationships within the Vatican. On the evening of 15 July Alfonso was set upon and seriously wounded as he crossed the piazza of St Peter’s on his way from the Vatican to the palace of Santa Maria in Portico where he lived with Lucrezia. Burchard reported:
On Wednesday 15 July, towards the tenth hour of evening, the most illustrious Don Alfonso d’Aragona, Duke of Bisceglie, husband of Donna Lucrezia, the Pope’s daughter, passing by the steps of the basilica of St Peter’s, before the first entrance, was attacked by several persons and gravely wounded in the head, the right arm and the thigh. The aggressors fled by the steps of St Peter’s where there were awaiting them about forty mounted men, with whom they rode towards the Porta Pertusa.
Alfonso, badly wounded, was carried into the Vatican, where the Borgias’ first reactions seem to have been shock and sympathy. Alexander had him placed in rooms near his own and tended by his personal doctors, while Lucrezia was reported to be ‘half-dead’. Cesare for his part issued an edict forbidding the carrying of arms in the Borgo.
In the atmosphere of fear and suspicion that surrounded the affair, some people dared not commit their opinions to paper. Alfonso’s former tutor, the Florentine humanist Raphael Brandolin, who received, a stipend from the papal court, wrote to Ferrara on the day following the attack: ‘Whose was the hand behind the assassins is still unknown. I will not, however, repeat which names are being voiced, because it is grave and perilous to entrust it to a letter.’ One name, however, was being voiced within twenty-four hours of the attempt on Bisceglie – Cesare’s. On 16 July Vincenzo Calmeta, poet and papal secretary, wrote his former patroness the Duchess of Urbino a detailed account of the incident, ending: ‘Who may have ordered this thing to be done, everyone thinks to be Duke Valentino.’ Alfonso’s wounds should not prove mortal, he thought, adding significantly: ‘If some new accident does not intervene.’ Others, noting similiarities between the attack on Bisceglie and Gandia’s murder, saw the hand of the Orsinis in the affair, since Alfonso was a partisan of the pro-Neapolitan Colonnas. And the Orsinis were now on good terms with Cesare, several of their captains having signed up with him for his next campaign. Although the Orsinis were the most likely authors, or rather bunglers, of the assassination attempt, it is feasible to consider that Cesare might have had foreknowledge of it, or at least welcomed it – he had his own personal reasons for desiring the elimination of Alfonso, as we shall see later. He is reported to have said: ‘I did not wound the Duke, but if I had, it would have been no more than he deserved,’ and he rather than the Orsinis would have had intimate knowledge of his brother-in-law’s movements. The one factor which may be seen to exculpate him from the actual planning of the attack was the bungling of its execution; his own henchmen never failed to carry
out his orders, as events were soon to show. Whatever the truth of the affair, for the moment the Borgias were not talking, nor it seems were they making any attempt to find the assassins. As the Florentine envoy Cappello wrote on 16 July: ‘Who may have wounded him, no one says, and there are no signs of diligent inquiries being made as there should be.’
Alfonso, anxiously tended by Lucrezia and Sancia, recovered relatively quickly from his wounds. On Tuesday, 18 August, just one month after the assassination attempt, he was sitting up in bed in his room in the Torre Borgia overlooking the gardens, chatting and laughing with his wife and sister, when sudden violence shattered the peace of the warm August afternoon. Brandolin gave a graphic account of the scene, moving in its detail:
On the advice of the doctors, the wounds were already bandaged, the sick man was without fever, or very little, and was joking in his bedroom with his wife and sister, when there burst into the chamber … Michelotto [Miguel da Corella] most sinister minister of Cesare Valentino; he seized by force Alfonso’s uncle and the royal envoy [of Naples], and having bound their hands behind their backs, consigned them to armed men who stood behind the door, to lead them to prison. Lucrezia, Alfonso’s wife, and Sancia, his sister, stupefied by the suddenness and violence of the act, shrieked at Michelotto, demanding how he dared commit such an offence before their very eyes and in the presence of Alfonso. He excused himself as persuasively as he could, declaring that he was obeying the will of others, that he had to live by the orders of another, but that they, if they wished, might go to the Pope, and it would be easy to obtain the release of the arrested men. Carried away with anger and pity … the two women went to the Pope, and insisted that he give them the prisoners. Meanwhile Michelotto, most wretched of criminals, and most criminal of wretches, suffocated Alfonso, who was indignantly reproving him for his offence. The women, returning from the Pope, found armed men at the door of the chamber, who prevented them from entering and announced that Alfonso was dead. Michelotto, the author of the crime, had invented the fiction which was neither true nor half true, that Alfonso, distraught by the greatness of his peril, having seen men linked with him by kinship and goodwill torn from his side, fell unconscious to the floor and that from the wound in his head much blood flowed and thus he died. The women, terrified by this most cruel deed, oppressed by fear, beside themselves with grief, filled the palace with their shrieking, lamenting and wailing, one calling on her husband, the other on her brother, and their tears were without end …
Burchard’s laconic report confirms Brandolin’s account, using significantly loaded phrases. Alfonso, he wrote, ‘refusing to die of his wounds, was strangled at four in the afternoon’. He added: ‘There were arrested and taken to Sant’Angelo the dead man’s doctors and a hunchback, but were later set free, being innocent, which fact was well known to those who had ordered their arrest.’
Six hours later Alfonso’s body was carried from the palace to St Peter’s and hastily interred in the chapel of Santa Maria delle Febbri. The dead prince was attended only by Cardinal Francesco Borgia, a confidant of Lucrezia’s, and his retinue. It was the quietest of funerals; for Alfonso, unlike Juan, there was no lying in state, no processions of chanting priests bearing lighted tapers through the streets of Rome. But the repercussions of his death reverberated through the city and the palace and indeed throughout Italy, quite overshadowing the recent Baglioni bloodbath at Perugia, where half the family had massacred the others in their beds. This time no one doubted that Cesare Borgia was the author of the crime. The question remained – why he had done it?
Some saw it as a purely political murder, motivated by Cesare’s desire to show the world that the Borgias were committed to France. Cattaneo reported as early as 30 July, two weeks after the first assassination attempt: ‘This matter is a pledge to France on the part of the Pope and Valencia, and to the designs of each, and where first they negotiated to give Valencia a state in Spain, now in everything they are with the French and the Venetians.’ But if this was the motive, then the crime was singularly unnecessary. Cesare had no need to make a public pledge of his allegiance to France, and stood to gain nothing by this deep affront to the house of Aragon, which included the King of Naples and Ferdinand. As the next few days were to show, he had already come to an agreement with Louis whereby the King of France promised him military and diplomatic support for renewed action in the Romagna in return for his participation in a French attack on Naples. Moreover France and Spain were not at this moment antagonistic towards each other, since negotiations were going on for the partition of the kingdom of Naples between the two powers which were to culminate in the cynical Treaty of Granada in November. Cesare’s brutalities were always calculated: there is not one single recorded instance of his committing an act of violence which he would have considered unnecessary or from which he did not stand to gain.
The official Borgia justification for the murder, repeated by Alexander to the diplomats, was that it was a necessary act of self-defence. As the Venetian Paolo Capello wrote on the day of the crime: ‘The Duke of Bisceglie is dead today because he planned to kill the Duke, when he was walking in the garden, with a crossbow … And the Duke says that his dead brother-in-law had written to the Colonnesis to come with troops, who had sympathizers in the Castello [Sant’Angelo] and would have cut the Orsinis to pieces.’ If the story of the plot were true – and it seems to have been widely believed not only by the Venetians, who were hostile to Naples, but by others including the level-headed Florentine Cappello, who reported it in a cipher letter to his government – it would explain the involvement of the Orsinis in the original assassination attempt. And in such a situation it would have been typical of Cesare to strike first. Yet it still does not provide an explanation of the time lapse between the original attack on Alfonso and his murder one month later.
The real explanation for the murder seems to have lain within the circle of Borgia family relationships in the Vatican, where Cesare’s motives were not only political but personal. Cappello wrote on 16 July: ‘The rumour in Rome grows that it is a matter between themselves, because in that Palace there are so many old and new hatreds, and so much envy and jealousy for political reasons and others …’ An internal power struggle between the partisans of France and those of Aragon had been waged for some time past within the Vatican, the ultimate prize being the mind of the Pope. There is little doubt that while Cesare was away in France the Aragonese party centred round Alfonso and Sancia had tried to win back Alexander to his old allegiance to Spain and the house of Aragon from which Louis’ promises to Cesare had weaned him. We have seen how in the spring of 1499 Cesare feared that his father, exasperated with Louis and at heart hostile to France, might return to his old friendships. When Cesare returned to Rome at the end of February after his prolonged absence, he was quick to sense a concealed undercurrent within the family circle in opposition to his interests. Sancia and Jofre, Alfonso and Lucrezia had lived on terms of the closest intimacy since Alfonso had rejoined the family at Spoleto the previous autumn, and Sancia had been allowed to return to Rome some time during the winter. This close-knit clique would clearly have had Aragonese sympathies; Jofre, a cipher, in the absence of his elder brother was dominated by his strong-willed wife, while Lucrezia, who had wept bitterly when Alfonso fled from Rome, was clearly very much in love with her husband. On 1 November 1499 she had given birth to her son by Alfonso, Rodrigo, and happy as she was in her role of wife and mother, it was not surprising that she should have felt in close sympathy with her husband.
Sancia, the eldest of the family party, was now in open opposition to Cesare; she was not afraid of him, and naturally put the interests of her family, threatened by Louis’ claims to Naples, above those of her brother-in-law and former lover. The tension between them had been revealed by a minor court incident in March, shortly after Cesare’s return. A quarrel between a Frenchman and a Burgundian under Cesare’s command had ended in a public duel on Monte Testaccio which too
k place in a bitterly partisan atmosphere with Cesare and Sancia taking opposing sides. The Burgundian won; Cesare, leader of the pro-French party, was deeply chagrined and is alleged to have said that he would have given 20,000 ducats rather than see the Frenchman beaten. Sancia was openly triumphant, and to tease her brother-in-law and parade her anti-French feelings she dressed twelve of her squires in the Burgundian colours.
Cesare, with his fiercely competitive temperament and overriding ambition, was not a man to brook opposition within his own family circle, above all when it threatened not only his political interests, his commitment to the French alliance, but also his personal position within the Vatican, and his two closest relationships, with his father and sister. Cesare’s relationship with his father was the most important of his whole life. He was dependent upon Alexander as the source of his power at that time, and he was determined that his father should follow the path in which he saw his own interests to lie, and that no one should come between them. As far as Lucrezia was concerned, Cesare’s intense love for his sister was notorious, and while he may have feared that her pro-Aragonese sympathies might influence her father, who doted on her, jealousy of her feelings for her husband fuelled his hatred for Alfonso. Thus Cesare saw Alfonso as a threat to himself, a threat which must be eliminated; moreover in the context of the future French campaign against Naples he was a political embarrassment whose elimination would be an advantage. Cesare was to prove himself adept at using others as his instruments, and in the case of Bisceglie it is likely that he made use of the Orsinis to achieve his object. When the Orsinis bungled the affair, he waited, hoping that Alfonso, badly injured as he was, would die anyway. It was only when it became clear that Alfonso, in Burchard’s words, ‘refused to die of his wounds’, that the need for direct action became necessary, and even then he moved with a certain circumspection, using the excuse of an Aragonese plot to justify his action to his father.
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