July passed into August, and still Cesare deferred his departure. In reality he was in an agony of suspense: the success of his plans depended on the timing of events which had seemed certain in June, but now appeared as if they could turn against him. In the last weeks of July Gaeta had still not fallen, and the French were massing in Lombardy for a descent on Naples. If the Spaniards did not take Gaeta before the French entered Tuscany, his hopes were at an end. And there was the security of the Romagna and his other states to be considered; if he openly took the Spanish side, his enemies might, in the wake of the huge French army, attack him through the chinks in his armour, Urbino and the recently acquired lordships. He had now to take the decision whether to ride northward and await the outcome of events, or remain in Rome and be forced to join the French on their way south. His tension mounted as the sweltering days passed with ever more discouraging reports. On 6 August news reached Rome that the French in strength with 1100 men-at-arms, 1400 light horse and some 8000 foot were on the move from Lombardy, which, wrote Giustinian, ‘has put the Spanish, the Pope and il Valentino beside themselves’. The next day the envoy found the Pope worried and preoccupied, talking of the sickness in Rome, depressed by the lack of news from Gaeta; the Spanish ambassador had assured him that it would soon fall, but Alexander told Giustinian gloomily: ‘We believe that if they have not taken it before Sunday, they will never have it.’ He said that Cesare’s departure was now definitely fixed for the 9th, and it seems that Cesare had come to a final decision.
Realist that he was, he recognized that the odds had turned against him. He would make some kind of accommodation with the French and ride northward to join his troops; Gaeta might still fall soon, and after the French passed south he might still be able to make his move; however, it was clearly time to hedge his bets. On 8 August the Mantuan envoy reported that he had summoned the French envoys and assured them that he was only going to review his troops and had no intention of molesting either Florence or Siena. After they left he is reported to have said: ‘These Spaniards will be finished if they do not have other help, and it will be expedient to me to be with the French coming in such power, otherwise I would lose everything.’ As he prepared to change political horses in mid-stream, he did not, however, appear particularly despondent. It is likely that he regarded the present perilous situation and the postponement of his plans as only a temporary setback. He was accustomed to playing a dangerous political game; he had always been able to extract the maximum advantage from the clash between France and Spain over Naples, and at this moment, with the best army he had ever commanded ready for action, he was in the best possible position to sell his services to the highest bidder. In fact he appeared to be in excellent health and spirits, hunting in the cool of dawn in the countryside round Rome, and writing to Isabella d’Este for more dogs for the chase. No doubt he was looking forward to his departure, to escape from the sweating inaction of Rome, and on 5 August, with his father, he attended a farewell supper party given by Adriano da Corneto in his country villa.
Alexander, on the other hand, was noticed to be uncharacteristically morose, oppressed by the dangerous political situation, the heat, and the prevalence of sickness. Two days after the Corneto supper party he remarked heavily to Giustinian: ‘Lord Orator, the fact that so many are sick in Rome now, and every day are dying, preoccupies us to the extent that we are disposed to take a little more care than we are accustomed of our person.’ For the first time in a long and healthy life, Alexander, now seventy-three, felt the intimations of mortality. That same year, his last child, Rodrigo Borgia, had been born, but now, weary and apprehensive, with men dying of fever round him, he at last felt the need to take care of his ageing body. He had been greatly depressed by the death on 1 August of his nephew Cardinal Juan Borgia-Lanzuol, after a bout of fever. The Cardinal was excessively corpulent, and as his funeral procession passed beneath the windows of the Vatican, Alexander, thinking of his own heavy body, remarked gloomily: ‘This month is fatal for fat men.’ August, he well knew, was a fatal month for popes. Of his predecessors, Calixtus, Pius II and Sixtus IV had all died in August, Innocent VIII at the end of July. This month of August 1503 was exceptionally hot; the envoys attached to the court wrote to their masters complaining of the stifling temperatures and particularly of the dangerously unhealthy air in the neighbourhood of the Vatican. Normally the court would have moved from Rome to the hills to escape not only the heat but the threat of malaria perniciosa, the fever borne into the city during the dog days by mosquitoes bred in the swamps of the Roman Campagna, a sickness which struck without warning, accompanied by fits of vomiting and bouts of fever which could raise a man’s temperature to over one hundred and six in a few hours. But this was not a normal year; in the present political situation Alexander could not afford to leave Rome, and so he and his court were forced to remain and face the danger.
On 11 August, the anniversary of his elevation to the Papacy, an occasion which he was accustomed to celebrate with gusto, observers remarked Alexander’s unusual apathy. Giustinian thought that he was deeply troubled by the political situation, and indeed the Pope after Mass told the Venetian grimly: ‘See how disastrous it has been that no understanding should have been reached between your Signoria and ourselves.’ In fact the true cause of his listlessness and depression was that the sickness was already upon him. On Saturday, 12 August, after dining, the Pope was seized with a fit of vomiting and fever which lasted through the night; on the same day Cesare, still in Rome, fell ill with the same symptoms.
For six days father and son lay gravely ill in the Vatican, while doctors fought to save their lives with the crude methods then at their disposal. Of the two, Cesare’s case was the more serious, but he was young and exceptionally strong. On the 14th, Alexander’s doctors bled him severely; ‘ten ounces – which seems too much and remarkable in a man of seventy-three,’ Giustinian commented. This seemed to bring him temporary relief, although it can only have served to undermine his physical reserves, and Giustinian wrote that his anxiety about Cesare’s illness was making him worse. Cesare’s doctors subjected him to even more drastic treatment. On the 15th they submerged him in a great oil jar filled with iced water, and the skin peeled from his body with the shock. Probably as a result of this, on the 16th he was reported to be in danger of his life, and in a worse condition than his father. The greatest secrecy was maintained about both cases, but the indefatigable Giustinian, questioning the doctors as they hurried in and out of the palace, managed to glean some details: ‘Both are still with fever … the Duke has it more strongly, with paroxysms of fever following one upon the other, and strange fits; and this past night at midnight he sent for the doctors who are tending him, who are not of the palace, and has kept them there and does not let them leave, and makes even more difficulty in letting his condition be known.’
Yet, even in the midst of his delirium, Cesare’s instinct of self-preservation was strong enough for him to send messages ordering a body of his troops back to Rome, and reassuring words to the Romagna. By the 17th, Alexander’s life was despaired of. Giustinian reported that evening: ‘The Palace was upside down, and everyone sought to save himself and his belongings, however with the greatest secrecy …’ With the Pope on the point of death, and their protector Cesare desperately ill, the Borgia party made every effort to conceal the gravity of Alexander’s condition in order to gain time to save themselves from the fury that they expected to descend upon them the moment the news of his death leaked out.
Alexander died on the afternoon of the following day, 18 August; in the room above his father’s, Cesare had surmounted his crisis, and although he was weak and exhausted he had recovered just in time to save himself from total ruin. On hearing of his father’s death he dispatched the faithful Michelotto with a body of armed men to close all the doors to the Pope’s chambers. Once inside, one of the soldiers drew a dagger and threatened to cut the throat of the Cardinal chamberlain Casanova if he did not
hand over the keys to the Pope’s closets. In a small chamber behind the Pope’s bedroom Michelotto and his men found silver and jewels to the value of 200,000 ducats, with a further 100,000 in cash in two small chests. In their haste they overlooked a further cache of valuables including the tiara, rings and more silver and jewels, but the 300,000 worth they took with them was more than enough to ensure their master’s immediate future. The papal servants then plundered the Pope’s apartments and wardrobes, leaving only the papal thrones, some cushions and hangings. At four o’clock in the afternoon they opened the doors of the pillaged apartments and announced that the Pope was dead. The reign of the second Borgia Pope was over.
Burchard, summoned to the palace just after four o’clock to supervise the laying out of his third Pope, found the Vatican deserted but for a few officials and servants, with not a cardinal in sight. Alexander’s body, clothed in red brocade vestments and covered with a fine tapestry, was laid on a table in the Sala del Papagallo, scene of so many Borgia festivities in the past, and there spent the night, totally alone, with two tapers burning beside the bier. The next day it was borne on a bier by the customary group of paupers to St Peter’s, where fighting broke out inside the church as the palace guards tried to seize the valuable wax tapers from the monks accompanying the body. The monks stopped chanting when the soldiers drew their swords, and fled into the sacristy, and in the confusion the Pope’s body was abandoned. Burchard and a few others who kept their heads had the bier dragged behind the railings of the high altar, and shut the iron grille for fear that Alexander’s enemies might desecrate his body.
During the day Alexander’s corpse began to decompose, and when Burchard went to look at it at about four o’clock he found it a most horrifying sight: ‘Its face had changed to the colour of mulberry or the blackest cloth, and it was covered in blue-black spots. The nose was swollen, the mouth distended where the tongue was doubled over and the lips seemed to fill everything. The appearance of the face then was more horrifying than anything that had ever been seen or reported before …’ The dead Pope’s putrefying body was hastily buried as the sun set. Francesco Gonzaga, writing to his wife from the French camp at Isola Farnese, described it as a burial so wretched that even the dwarf wife of the cripple at Mantua had a more honourable one. He too gave a lurid description of the body, saying that it swelled up until it had lost all human form and was as broad as it was long; since everyone refused to touch it, a porter dragged it from the bier to the grave with a rope attached to one of the feet. Burchard relates that the corpse was unceremoniously stuffed into its coffin by six porters making blasphemous jokes about the late Pope and his hideous appearance: ‘The carpenters had made the coffin too narrow and short, so they placed the Pope’s mitre at his side, rolled up his body in an old carpet, and pummelled and pushed it into the coffin with their fists. No wax tapers or lights were used and no priests or any other persons attended his body.’
No sooner had Alexander’s body been hurried to its grave than rumours began to spread as to the manner of his end. There were stories of Satanic mysteries surrounding his death, that the devil in the form of an ape had appeared in his chamber on the day he died, and had been seen disguised as a black dog running through St Peter’s on the day he was buried. Indeed some said that he had made a Faustian pact with the devil, a story which Francesco Gonzaga retailed to Isabella:
When he fell sick, he began to talk in such a way that anyone who did not know what was in his mind would have thought that he was wandering, although he was perfectly conscious of what he said; his words were: ‘I come, it is right, wait a moment.’ Those who know the secret say that in the conclave following the death of Innocent he made a compact with the devil, and purchased the Papacy from him at the price of his soul. Among the other provisions of the agreement was one which said that he should be allowed to occupy the Holy See twelve years, and this he did with the addition of four days. There are some who affirm that at the moment he gave up his spirit, seven devils were seen in his chamber.
That a man like Francesco Gonzaga should have found such a story credible is indicative of the extent to which dark remnants of medieval superstition lingered on in the back of the most sophisticated Renaissance minds.
There were of course the usual rumours of poison, stimulated by the frightful appearance of the corpse. Four days after the Pope’s death, reports that he and Cesare had been poisoned at Adriano da Corneto’s supper had spread as far as Florence. As usual with a story concerning the Borgias, it was given a poignant twist: planning to murder the wealthy Cardinal for his money, they had bribed a servitor to poison the wine, and then through a mix-up of the flagons had drunk the poisoned wine themselves. This tale of the Borgias hoist with their own petard spread throughout Europe; it was repeated in the chronicles of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera at the court of Spain on 10 November, and even reached the ears of Luther. Giovio, Bembo and Guicciardini all repeated it in their histories. (Guicciardini’s information was so inaccurate that he had Alexander die the day after the Corneto supper.) In fact the story was patently absurd: the famous supper took place on the 5th, none of the participants felt any ill effects until six days later, when da Corneto himself went down with the fever, while Alexander and Cesare and several other guests at the party fell sick on the 12th, a week after the fatal evening.
It is a measure of Alexander’s impact on his contemporaries that none of them could regard him with objectivity, even after his death. For many, no words could be bad enough for him. Machiavelli in his Decennale Primo described Alexander’s soul being transported to heaven followed by ‘his three familiars and dear handmaidens, Luxury [by which he meant sensuality], Simony, and Cruelty’, and there was a great deal of truth in what he said. Alexander’s faults were as great as his abilities. He was possessed of enormous intelligence, farsightedness and administrative ability, besides being one of the ablest diplomats ever to occupy the papal throne. Where the temporal interests of the Church were threatened, he fought with all his powers and with outstanding success. During the twelve years of his Papacy he succeeded in accomplishing what no one else had done before, in crushing the power of the great families who had held the Papacy to ransom in the past, and destroying the independent vicars of the Romagna. Even his enemies admitted that he was more absolute master of Rome than any pope had ever been before him, and when he died the Papacy was a great military power, the only kind of power that really counted in the contemporary context. It is equally true, however, that he could have accomplished none of these things without Cesare; together they formed an irresistible combination of dynamic energy and supreme ability which swept all before it.
On the international scene he had played his cards with consummate skill, so that the great powers of Europe could no longer dictate to the pope as they had in the days of Avignon, but were forced to compete for his friendship. He had been elected as a political pope, as the circumstances of Italy at the time demanded, and on that basis he had more than fulfilled expectations. The open sensuality of his private life and the absolute ruthlessness of his political methods were admittedly shocking in a man who held the office of High Priest of Christendom, but in his simoniacal practices he merely continued and extended fund-raising methods initiated by his predecessors, notably Sixtus IV. The cupidity ridiculed by his contemporaries was inspired not by love of money for its own sake but by the consciousness that money meant power, and that without it nothing could be achieved. He was the most nepotistic of popes, but there is a strong case for arguing, as Machiavelli did, that Cesare’s career advanced the temporal power of the Church. Alexander was a supreme example of a man who believed that the end justified the means, and it was the ruthless gangsterism of his methods, for which Cesare must be held largely responsible, which incurred the odium of those who were threatened by them. The charge levelled by the author of the Savelli Letter – ‘All men fear him and above all fear his son’ – contained a considerable element of truth: Cesare
inspired an atmosphere of terror in which prominent people literally feared for their lives. Alexander VI was, in short, the most outrageous and one of the most able popes who ever lived. Most of his contemporaries regarded him with a mixture of hatred, fear and admiration. Guicciardini, no friend to the Borgias, while cataloguing Alexander’s vices, could not help admitting his great qualities, winding up with the epitaph: ‘He was, in sum, the worst and the most fortunate pope that has ever been …’
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