Cesare certainly did not regard the ducal palace as a permanent home: while referring to himself in certain acts as ‘Duke of Urbino’, he systematically looted the Montefeltro possessions, valued by contemporaries at 150,000 ducats, and had them taken to the Rocca of Forlì. A local chronicler reported: ‘Il Valentino, while he was at Urbino and afterwards, had all the furniture of Guidobaldo taken from the palace and sent to the Rocca of Forlì: so that during an entire month 180 mules were employed each day; thus that so honoured house was despoiled of silver and rich tapestries, with the magnificent and rare library and all the other hangings, also horses, mules and the perfect stud horses.’ While Cesare, who had no blood ties with Guidobaldo, had little hesitation in removing his most valued possessions, the unfortunate Duke’s own relations also showed few scruples about acquiring his property. His sister-in-law, Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, whose cupidity as a collector overcame her family feelings, wrote to her brother Ippolito at Rome asking him to intercede with Cesare for the Venus and the Cupid which had adorned the ducal palace. She believed both statues to be antique, she said, and did not think her request ‘to be an inconvenient idea, knowing that His Excellency [Cesare] does not take much pleasure in antiques …’
Cesare, whose cultural tastes inclined to literature, and to vernacular poetry in particular, did not share the current Italian passion for collecting antiquities. He was, moreover, anxious to stand well with the Gonzagas, deeply offended by his expulsion of Guidobaldo, who with his Duchess, Francesco’s sister, had taken refuge at Mantua. He hastened to send one of his chamberlains to present the statues to Isabella on 21 July, accompanying the gift with a personal letter explaining that the Cupid (which he had given to Guidobaldo years before while still a Cardinal) was not in fact an antique statue as she believed, but the work of the Florentine sculptor Michelangelo. Isabella was enchanted with it. ‘The Cupid, for a modern work, has no equal,’ she wrote to her husband, who was with Louis in Lombardy. Isabella’s true feelings about Cesare were revealed in a letter she wrote to her husband the following day. Sound political common sense prompted her in a letter of 23 July to warn the hot-headed Francesco, who was reported to have uttered public threats against Cesare, not to commit himself against il Valentino:
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, will, I am certain, not hesitate to plot against your person … it would be perfectly easy for anyone to poison Your Excellency …
July was a tense month; on the 28th Louis entered Milan, surrounded by enemies who were bent on Cesare’s destruction – Giuliano della Rovere, Cardinal Riario, Francesco Gonzaga, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Giovanni Sforza, one of Bentivoglio’s sons, and Cardinal Orsini, who had fled from Rome to join the anti-Borgia chorus round the French King. Cesare, away from the oppressively hostile atmosphere of Urbino, was back in the reassuring surroundings of his camp at Fermignano, where he spent the cool early mornings hunting with leopards in the hills. On the 7th he had a fall from his horse while hunting, and such was his reputation for deviousness that the Venetian ambassador believed it be a deliberate ruse to excuse himself from going to the King to justify himself. But the fall was not serious enough to have prevented him riding to Louis had he wanted to; he continued to hunt ‘incognito, among a host of his servants dressed in livery, his face wrapped in gauze’. He had no intention of making a humiliating crawl to the French King under the delighted eyes of his enemies, nor indeed of meeting Louis until circumstances had turned in his favour. Louis had made his displeasure at events in Tuscany abundantly clear to both the Borgias, and to placate him a henchman was to be thrown to the wolves. By 15 July Vitellozzo, who had meanwhile taken Borgo di San Sepolcro ‘in the name of Duke Valentino’, was ordered to withdraw, a command followed by a threat from Cesare to march on his lordship of Città di Castello if he did not obey. By the end of the month, Vitellozzo and Gian Paolo Baglioni had retreated from Tuscany, raging inwardly at Cesare’s desertion of them. Cesare was waiting too for news of the fall of Camerino, which surrendered on 21 July. The seventy-year-old Giulio Cesare Varano and two of his sons were handed over into the custody of Cesare’s officers, and few doubted what this implied for the former lords of Camerino.
Alexander was so carried away with delight that in consistory he forgot to have important news from Hungary read to the cardinals and treated them to an exuberant dissertation on his son’s exploits instead. ‘The cause of such great joy’, wrote Giustinian caustically, ‘is the capture of those lords, who in everyone’s opinion will come to a bad end.’ From Urbino Cesare wrote an affectionate letter to Lucrezia, who was having a difficult pregnancy with her first child by Alfonso: ‘There could be no more salubrious nor more efficacious medicine for your present indisposition than the reception of good and happy tidings …’ He hoped she would soon be better, for, as he wrote, ‘with your illness we can find no pleasure in this news nor in anything else …’, signing himself, ‘from your brother who loves you as himself. With all his other preoccupations Cesare worried enough about Lucrezia to send her his own doctor Torella, and on the 15th he wrote to a famous doctor at Cesena, Niccolò Masini, requesting him to go to Ferrara to consult with Torella about Lucrezia’s case.
But the surrender of Camerino, however gratifying, was of minor importance compared with the outcome of the secret negotiations between Louis and the Borgias which were being carried on in Milan behind the backs of the enemy lords. For Cesare, his future plans were dependent on his securing himself from the threat from his own condottieri; for this, and for the extension of his conquests, he was once again dependent on Louis’ support. In Rome, Giustinian picked up hints of the behind-the-scenes bargaining; on 1 August he reported that Alexander and Cesare had promised the French King 500 men-at-arms and Cesare to lead them in person, with free passage and supplies for the expedition to Naples. Later in the week, against a background of increasing rumours as to a secret understanding between Alexander and Louis, he wrote that the Pope intended to give Cesare the vicariates of Città di Castello and Perugia. It seems clear that the Borgias had obtained a promise of what they wanted from the King, and were now intent on proceeding with their plans.
It was at this point that Cesare made a typically dramatic gesture. Disguised as a Knight of St John, and accompanied only by three horsemen, including his trusted henchmen Troches and Michele Remolino, he left Fermignano on 25 July and the next day was at Forlì, having covered eighty miles in twenty-four hours. Stopping only to change horses and to dine on chickens and squabs in great number, ‘to the scandal of the populace and their own shame’ (it was a Friday, when the rules of the Church forbid the eating of meat), they rode on to Ferrara, where Cesare spent two hours at Lucrezia’s bedside before going on to Modena. At Milan, Louis kept the news of his impending arrival there secret. Only on 5 August, a few hours before Cesare actually entered Milan, did he impart the news in a manner calculated to give Cesare’s enemies, by whom he was surrounded, the maximum of disagreeable surprise. According to the chronicler Bernardi, he communicated the news to the governor of Milan in a stage whisper loud enough for everyone to hear, and left to meet Cesare ‘with only a small following, since all the rest remained where they were stupefied’. While Cesare’s enemies were stupefied by the news of his arrival, they were even more disconcerted by the warmth of his reception. As Isabella’s friend Niccolò da Corregio reported from Milan on the 8th:
His Most Christian Majesty welcomed and embraced him with great joy and led him to the Castle, where he had him lodge in the chamber nearest his own, and he himsel
f ordered the supper, choosing diverse dishes, and that evening three or four times he went to his room dressed in shirt sleeves, when it was time to go to bed. And he ordered yesterday that he should dress in his own shirts, tunic and robes, for Duke Valentino brought no baggage wagons with him, only horses. In short – he could not have done more for a son or a brother.
At Rome, Alexander, the one man who might have been expected to have news of it, was equally surprised and upset by his son’s initiative. Despite Cesare’s honourable reception, Giustinian reported on 9 August: ‘The Pope is not content with this journey of his, and is deeply troubled, because from an unimpeachable source I hear that the Duke went without any consultation nor informing His Holiness, urged on by Troches, who was the one who carried on the negotiation.’ Increasingly in this year of 1502, Cesare acted on his own initiative, independently of his father; anticipating his disapproval or fearing his talkativeness, he presented Alexander with a fait accompli which he was forced to accept. There was, in fact, a deep divergence between them in their attitude to France. While Cesare regarded Louis as the key to the achievement of his personal ambitions, Alexander, Spanish at heart, remained deeply mistrustful of France, and indeed on this occasion he was again worried that Louis might keep Cesare as a hostage, and fearful of the effect Cesare’s action would have on his own relations with Spain. By the middle of the month, however, he was slightly reassured by the news that Louis had dismissed Cesare’s enemies, the exiled lords, from court. ‘He praised the prudence of the Duke, that with the ability of his mind, he had made the king so friendly towards him, when at first he had seemed to regard him as a rebel …’
Once again Cesare’s instinctive grasp of the realities of politics had enabled him to outwit his enemies and triumph despite the apparent odds against him. He knew, as his enemies should have known, that Louis’ obsession with Naples would bring him over to the Borgia side. For while the Italian princes who crowded round the King could give him nothing but their personal services, Cesare had far more to offer. As Machiavelli wrote of him some months later: ‘The Duke is not to be measured like other lords, who have only their titles, in respect to his state; but one must think of him as a new power in Italy …’
Even Francesco Gonzaga somewhat belatedly realized this. Although on the day of Cesare’s arrival he had boasted to the Venetian envoy that he would fight a hand-to-hand duel with ‘that bastard son of a priest’ and thus be the one to liberate Italy, two days later he was forced to swallow his bold words in a public reconciliation with Valentino. As he wrote to Isabella: ‘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 banqueting …’ In seeking Francesco’s friendship, Cesare was pursuing his policy of alliance with neighbouring powers, and, as Lucrezia had been the symbol of his relationship with the Estes of Ferrara, so his two-year-old daughter Luisa was to be betrothed to Gonzaga’s son of the same age, Federigo, as a pledge of this somewhat hollow alliance. Cesare demanded concrete proof of Gonzaga’s goodwill by insisting that he should expel his refugee brother-in-law Guidobaldo from his court. He was well aware of the precarious nature of his hold upon Urbino, and the popular Guidobaldo at large represented a threat to it. Having failed to lay hands upon him in June, the Borgias’ solution to the problem of Guidobaldo was ingenious: he was to renounce his rights to the duchy in return for a cardinal’s hat and a generous life pension. Having robbed Guidobaldo of his state, Cesare now deprived him of his public reputation as a man. Despite an extremely erotic temperament – Elisabetta was in constant terror lest he endanger his weak health by his frequent passionate advances to her – Guidobaldo was impotent. This sad secret, carefully guarded between them during the fourteen years of their marriage, now became public knowledge. Nonetheless Elisabetta absolutely refused to consider the Borgias’ proposal, saying that she preferred to live with her husband as a sister than to be no longer his wife.
Cesare’s constant preoccupation with the security of his states was clearly illustrated in his employment at this time of Leonardo da Vinci as his military architect and engineer. From Pavia on 18 August Cesare issued a patent in which he described Leonardo as:
our most Excellent and Most Beloved Familiar Architect and General Engineer … [who] has our commission to survey the holds and fortresses of our States in order that according to their necessities and his judgement we may provide for them. They are to give free passage, exempt from all public toll for himself and his company, and friendly reception, and to allow him to see, measure and estimate all he may wish. And to this effect they shall order men on his requisition, and lend him all the help, assistance and favours he may request, it being our wish that for all works to be done in our dominions any engineer be compelled to consult him and to conform to his opinion; and to this may none presume to act in opposition if it be his wish not to incur our indignation.
Leonardo entered Cesare’s service some time in the summer of 1502. He was certainly at Urbino at the end of July, and may possibly have accompanied Vitellozzo in Tuscany, since he drew maps of the Arezzo and Val di Chiana areas, and remained in his employ until about the end of January 1503. During the time he worked for Cesare he produced maps which must have been used during the campaigns, towns plans for Urbino, Cesena and Imola, projections for a revolutionary system of defences at Imola, and for a canal to connect Cesena with Porto Cesenatico. Cesare, who, like Leonardo, was passionately interested in fortifications, artillery and engines of war, must have appreciated his genius in this respect. One reward which he bestowed on him was recorded by Leonardo in a list of his belongings to be left ‘in a crate at the monastery’ – ‘One cape in the French style, which belonged to Duke Valentino’. The only other reference to Cesare in Leonardo’s notes is brief but expressive: ‘Where is Valentino?’
It is not surprising that considerations of security and defence should have been uppermost in il Valentino’s mind at this time. The danger from his own condottieri, which had haunted him at Urbino, loomed even nearer as the time approached for Louis to leave for France and for himself to take the road again for the Romagna. But Cesare, as Alexander told the Venetian envoy, ‘was so circumspect that he knew well how to guard himself against anyone’. Some time before the end of August he reached a secret formal agreement with Louis. No documentary record of its terms has yet come to light, but historians have inferred its content from subsequent events. While Florence was definitely excluded from Borgia hostility, Bologna was to be abandoned to Cesare, who was also left free to deal with his condottieri as his needs might dictate, and to compensate for the loss of their troops Louis seems to have promised a considerable French reinforcement. In return the Borgias repeated the pledge made at the end of July of political and military support for the French cause in Naples. Louis clearly considered the abandoning of most of his Italian supporters hitherto – the Orsinis and Bentivoglios – as a reasonable price to pay for Cesare’s support. At Rome in the last week of August, Alexander, the barometer of his son’s political affairs, suddenly abandoned his previous anxieties, spoke continually of Cesare, and, reported Giustinian, ‘every hour shows himself to be more for the French’.
Cesare left Genoa where he had gone with Louis from Milan on 2 September 1502. On the 7th he was at Ferrara with Lucrezia, who was ill and depressed after the birth two days earlier of a still-born daughter. Despite his own preoccupations he spent two days with her, cheering her up. His affectionate care for her is shown by a letter written by one of her doctors to Duke Ercole: ‘Today at the twentieth hour we bled Madonna on the right foot. It was exceedingly difficult to accomplish it, and we could not have done it but for the Duke of Romagna, who held her foot. Her Majesty spent two hours with the Duke, who made her laugh and cheered her greatly.’ Lucrezia made a rapid recovery, and knowing her to be out of danger Cesare rode south to Imola to begin a dangerously high game with his condottieri, a ga
me in which the stake could be not only the existence of the states which he had won, but even, perhaps, his life.
XII
‘A Most Beautiful Deception’
BY 10 September 1502 Cesare was back in the Romagna, setting up headquarters at Imola and attending to administrative affairs and to the assembling of troops for his next campaign. The objective was to be Bologna, which he, as Gonfalonier and Captain General, was to wrest from the control of the ‘tyrant’ Giovanni Bentivoglio and restore to the Church. Louis, in accordance with the agreement, had withdrawn his protection and dispatched an envoy to Bentivoglio warning him to look to himself, since he, Louis, would not oppose the Pope’s wishes. Alexander had summoned Bentivoglio to Rome to answer charges of maladministration, and given him fifteen days to comply. The groundwork for the attack on Bologna was laid, but the question remained whether the Orsinis, as soldiers of the Church, would comply with the Pope’s orders to march with Cesare, and if they did not, whether Vitellozzo and the Baglionis would follow suit.
Tension mounted during September as Cesare’s suspect condottieri debated whether or not they should obey. Vitellozzo, sick with syphilis at Città di Castello, Gian Paolo Baglioni at Perugia, and the Orsinis in their castles round Rome became increasingly nervous and suspicious as rumours flew that the Borgias intended to dispossess them of their lordships in the name of the Church. On 25 September Giulio Orsini told Alexander to his face that the French had warned Cardinal Orsini at Milan that it was the Pope’s intention to ruin his house. Alexander replied fiercely that they lied in their throats, but the next day the Orsinis gathered for an ominous family conference at Todi. The Venetian envoy reported Alexander as being tense and nervous. As was his wont when something was worrying him, he repeatedly asked anxiously: ‘What do you think, Lord Orator, that these Orsinis will do?’
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