One man sincerely mourned Alexander – his son Cesare. Their partnership had been in many ways a unique one, and after the early years it had been quite unlike the normal relationship between father and son. Alexander had been exceptionally young for his age, Cesare in many ways mature for his. It was as if they had been close contemporaries playing together and working together, with the same objectives, the same methods, the same attitudes of mind. Towards the end of Alexander’s life it seems that Cesare was the driving force behind the partnership, and that to a certain extent he dominated his father, who loved and admired him, and was perhaps a little afraid of him. This seems, at least, to have been the impression gained of their relationship by contemporaries. While Capello’s Relazione and the opinion at the French court reported by the Venetian envoy there as to Alexander’s fear of Cesare were probably exaggerated, Machiavelli certainly thought that it was Cesare who made the decisions. Giustinian, an observer at the Roman court where Alexander’s figure naturally loomed large, tended to see them as a partnership. He habitually referred to them as ‘they’ and ‘the Pope and the Duke’, although he made several references to the fact that Alexander could never refuse Cesare anything. Certainly Cesare planned the Sinigallia coup quite independently of his father, who was not allowed to know anything about it until the last moment, and, as Burchard confirms, it was on his orders and not the Pope’s that the Orsini arrests were made in Rome on 3 January. Giustinian, who always suspected Alexander to be playing games with him, did not know whether Alexander was feigning his indignation at Cesare’s disobedience to his orders to return from Tuscany and attack the Orsinis, but the picture that emerged from his dispatches of Alexander angry and frustrated, powerless to bend his son to his will, seemed real enough. Whether Cesare dominated his father or not, the key to their relationship was that each was indispensable to the other.
And Alexander died before Cesare had reached the point where he could consider himself strong enough to stand alone, at the very moment, as both Guicciardini and Machiavelli agreed, when he was within sight of the final achievement of his goals. Both the Borgias, in the five years since Cesare took up the sword, had been working against time to secure his position before the Pope should die. The blow had always been anticipated, but when it fell it fell with an extreme malignity. As Cesare told Machiavelli two months after Alexander’s death, he had thought of everything that could happen when his father died, except for the possibility that when he did so he himself would also be at the point of death.
XIV
Lone Wolf
ALL over Italy Cesare’s enemies and former allies watched to see what he would do. There were rumours that he was dead or dying. Twenty-four hours after Alexander’s death, he had a relapse; Giustinian reported on the 19th: ‘The Duke is more feverish than before, and “the crowd” here are in the expectation and hope that he will soon follow his father.’ Men like Ercole d’Este sat on the fence, wondering whether this would be the end of the powerful Duke Valentino, while his enemies, the Orsinis and Colonnas, Florence, Venice, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the Baglionis and the other dispossessed lords, moved to the attack. Venice provided Guidobaldo with troops to regain Urbino, Florence gave men to Jacopo d’Appiano to return to Piombino, and the Baglionis with Florentine encouragement took La Magione and presented themselves before Perugia. Venice hovered like a great gilded bird of prey over Cesare’s states of Romagna, watching for the moment to swoop. As if this were not enough, Prospero Colonna with a considerable body of Spanish troops sent by Gonsalvo de Cordoba was at Marino, a few hours’ march from Rome, while the huge French army commanded by Francesco Gonzaga had accelerated its march southward at the news of Alexander’s death and was now nearing Rome.
Cesare knew that precious time had been lost during the six days he had lain delirious. Still weak and exhausted and subject to recurrent bouts of fever, even so he reacted to the situation with speed and decision. He had seized his father’s treasure; his troops under Michelotto and Jofre held the Borgo; reinforcements had already been ordered to make their way with all speed back to Rome. He now had three urgent problems to confront: his personal security in Rome, the conservation of his Romagna states, and most important of all, the election of a new pope favourable to his interests. As for his own security vis-à-vis the hostile Roman barons, while he knew the Orsinis to be irreconcilable he had not personally injured the Colonnas, who, backed by Spanish troops, were in any case the stronger party. On the evening of Alexander’s death, he had dispatched envoys to Prospero Colonna offering the restitution of the family lands, with the countersigns of their fortresses as a pledge of good faith, while the next day he sent Cardinal Borgia to escort the Spanish ambassador to the Vatican for an interview. On the 22nd, Cesare’s loyal right-hand man, Agapito Geraldini, signed an agreement with the Colonnas in his master’s name, and on the 23rd Prospero entered Rome. On the same day Fabio and Niccolò Orsini arrived with 400 horse and 1500 foot, but were helpless to do Cesare any harm in the face of the combined Borgia and Colonna forces, and were ordered to withdraw the next day having achieved little beyond sacking the houses of a few Borgia courtiers.
In fact, thanks to his firm handling of the situation, Cesare was still very much the strong man in Rome. He had troops and money, while his nominal masters, the College of Cardinals, had neither. Two hundred of his lances had arrived from the north and were encamped outside the city, while as to money, as Giustinian remarked, the College had not a penny, because ‘the Duke has had it all’. He held Castel Sant’Angelo, where the castellan was his partisan, and the Vatican, which he had stripped of all its furnishings, while the Sacred College met nervously in the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. Until Cesare and the Borgia troops left the city, they could not feel themselves safe enough to hold the conclave for the election of a new pope in the Vatican. Protracted negotiations then took place, with the College and the foreign ambassadors, led by Giustinian, attempting to persuade Cesare to leave, while he for his part played for time, pleading sickness and the threats of his numerous enemies. It was not until 30 August that agreement was finally reached and Cesare consented to depart, on condition that the College reconfirmed him as Gonfalonier until the election of a new pope, guaranteed his safety and that of the cardinals dependent upon him, ordered Venice not to molest his states, and wrote to his Romagnol cities urging their continued allegiance to him.
Cesare was determined not to leave Rome until the last possible moment. For him, as for the other powers, the outcome of the forthcoming papal election was of overriding importance. Control of the election of his father’s successor had always been one of his principal objectives, and he was not prepared now tamely to withdraw in the face of a situation to which he believed he held the key. Thanks to his policy of nominating his partisans to the cardinalate he controlled the votes of between eight to eleven cardinals, or roughly a third of the voting strength of the College – men who, as Giustinian remarked, ‘attended to his wishes with more reverence than they did to Pope Alexander’. Neither the pro-French nor the pro-Spanish parties in the College were strong enough to swing the election on their own, while the ‘Italian’ cardinals were, in the Venetian envoy’s words, ‘lost men’, leaderless and open to intimidation by all parties. Cesare made every effort to ensure that they should remain so; there were rumours that he had laid ambushes for his two principal enemies, Giuliano della Rovere and Raffaele Riario, at the ports and by land in order to prevent them reaching Rome. Giustinian reported on 26 August that Cesare was ‘resolved by whatever means to make one of his own [men] Pope; since without that he sees himself deprived of everything; and the fear is not lacking that, seeing he cannot make one according to his purpose, he will not make some schism in the Church, since he has eight cardinals who follow him in everything’. It was rumoured that the previous Saturday eleven cardinals had sworn on the host in Cesare’s presence to make Giovanni Vera pope, or to create a schism.
Cesare was not a
lone in regarding himself as the pope-maker; both France and Spain, convinced that the success of their respective causes in Naples depended largely on the election of a pope favourable to themselves, competed feverishly for his support. As Ferdinand and Isabella wrote to their envoy in Rome, de Rojas: ‘As to the war in Naples, we believe that a great part of the success of that operation or the contrary lies in who will be pope …’ They therefore urged de Rojas to cement an alliance with Cesare and to ensure that ‘he perseveres with us’. Both sides were equally eager to have his support in the coming clash in the kingdom of Naples. Cesare had at first seemed to incline to Spain – their army headed by the Colonnas was nearest to Rome, and he was in need of their immediate protection – but he was deliberately vague in his commitment, and as the huge French army approached from the north the Spaniards became increasingly suspicious that he might, in Prospero Colonna’s words, ‘play them a bad turn’. On 1 September, the eve of Cesare’s departure from Rome, the Spanish envoy admitted to Giustinian his dislike and distrust of il Valentino, and equally his need of him: ‘He has plenty of good men: he must of necessity be with us or the French in the enterprise of the Kingdom, and to each side it would be a great reinforcement to have him. And you know that the French have tried everything to have him, and have not failed to offer him Siena, and Pisa, and the state of Giangiordano [Orsini], nor am I yet sure that they will not corrupt him with these their large offers …’
On the very day that de Rojas was voicing his suspicions, Cesare had in fact signed a secret agreement with France. Louis promised to take Cesare and his family under his protection, with all their possessions, lands and lordships, to safeguard the states which he held and to help him recover those he had lost. In return Cesare pledged himself to serve the King against any power save the pope and the Holy See, to place all his forces at the King’s disposal and to unite them to the French army for the campaign in Naples. The reasons for Cesare’s sudden volte-face are not hard to divine: in the present uncertain state of affairs it was far more important to him to conserve what he already had than to rely on vague promises of future rewards from Spain. Only Louis’ friendship could restrain his enemies, notably Florence and Venice, from making inroads into the Romagna, and persuade his potential friends such as Ercole d’Este into active support. Moreover with Gaeta still holding out for France and powerful French reinforcements on the march southward, the issue of the Naples question was still far from certain, and it might well be that the Spaniards would be unable to deliver what they had promised him. Cesare had always had a tendency to favour the French court, which he knew and understood, and had in fact never openly committed himself against them, while he rightly suspected the Spanish sovereigns of a deep hostility towards himself, an animosity shared and ill concealed by their Roman representative, de Rojas.
On the following day, 2 September, Cesare finally left Rome, ostensibly to join Prospero Colonna and the Spaniards at Tivoli. He was accompanied by his family, including Vannozza and Jofre, all his baggage, and ‘women of every kind’, according to a report of the Mantuan envoy. These women probably did not include Dorotea Caracciolo, whom Giustinian noted on 23 August as having been sent to Castel Sant’Angelo after the Pope’s death, and since Cesare from then on repeatedly disclaimed all knowledge of her whereabouts it seems likely that he did not wish to exacerbate Venetian hostility by openly taking her with him. He himself was too weak to ride, and lay in a closed litter with curtains of crimson damask borne by eight halberdiers, followed by his charger in black velvet trappings with the ducal coronet and insignia. It was, wrote the envoy Cattaneo, ‘a grave and honourable sight, arousing compassion’. Indeed he was still very ill, and in the last week of August he suffered a further relapse and was reported to be in peril of his life. Cattaneo wrote that he was completely exhausted, his limbs wasted by continual high fever, and the soles of his feet so swollen that he could not walk. It is remarkable that in this condition Cesare could have had the energy left to take the action that he did, but physically feeble as he now was, his will to win and driving ambition never left him. He was still, as d’Amboise had remarked of him that summer, ‘possessed of a devil’.
Even now he was strong enough to devise a typical ruse for his departure, designed to lull Spanish suspicion and conceal his agreement with France until he was safely out of reach of Prospero Colonna and his Spanish allies. It had been agreed that Colonna would wait for him outside the city, and that together they would proceed to Tivoli, and in order to strengthen this impression he dispatched his artillery across the Tiber in the Tivoli direction, and his advance guard to the Ponte Milvio. Meanwhile, as the unsuspecting Prospero was waiting for him outside the Porta del Popolo, Cesare was carried out of the Porta Viridaria near the Vatican. Once safely outside the city, after a short private interview with the French ambassador, he took the road to Nepi, to be joined en route by his advance guard, while the artillery doubled back to Castel Sant’Angelo. Furious at this deception, Prospero left for the Spanish camp accompanied by Sancia, who, as Giustinian remarked caustically, would ‘give him some consolation’. Sancia, who for some unrevealed reason had been confined in Castel Sant’Angelo since October 1502, showed no regret at being parted from Jofre, who accompanied Cesare to Nepi, and within a very short time she was Prospero Colonna’s mistress. As Giustinian wrote: ‘She has gone in a high good humour, with the hope of having her states in the Kingdom, and in all events there is little love between her and her husband and they are by nature very unsuited.’
The immediate results of his volte-face were all that Cesare could have wished for. The French, who not unnaturally mistrusted the sincerity of his intentions, waited for this open sign of his good faith before fulfilling their side of the bargain. It was not therefore until 5 September that they dispatched letters to the Romagna with the news that Cesare was once again ‘alive, well and the friend of the King of France’. However the news reached Cesare’s Romagnol cities in time to stem the tide that was running against him. Guidobaldo had already re-entered Urbino at the end of August, Gian Paolo Baglioni, after an initial repulse, marched into Perugia on 9 September, while the remaining Vitellis triumphantly took over Città di Castello, parading their emblem of a golden calf through the streets. In the Romagna, Venice had occupied Porto Cesenatico on 1 September, sent Giovanni Sforza back to Pesaro on the 3rd, and Pandolfo Malatesta to Rimini on the 6th. They had then attempted, in concert with troops from Urbino, to storm Cesena, but had been stoutly repulsed. Attempts on the part of Giovanni Bentivoglio and the Florentines to help Caterina’s son Ottaviano Riario regain Imola and Francesco Manfredi Faenza had equally failed. The Romagna had thus survived the first onslaught, and the news of Cesare’s agreement with France caused his enemies to draw back. Venice abandoned the offensive, and Florence sent him offers of help: Lucrezia’s father-in-law, the cautious Ercole, came off his fence to write to Cesare offering his congratulations on his recovery and 200 troops for the defence of the Romagna. Cesare’s quick reactions had enabled him to survive the immediate crisis.
But Cesare, as he was carried away from the city which he had come to regard as his power-base, must have been in an uncertain state of mind. The agreement with Louis had gained him a breathing space, but no more, and the temporary lull in military and political activity would end with the election of a new pope. For Cesare, as for the other powers, everything seemed to hang on the outcome of that election, and he fretted at being removed from the scene of action. As the Borgia and Colonna troops left the city, and the French and Spanish forces withdrew to a carefully equal distance, the prospective candidates for the tiara began to gather in Rome to begin the tortuous race for the Papacy.
One of the first to arrive was the Borgias’ old enemy Giuliano della Rovere, returning to Rome for the first time since he had fled to France in 1497, and determined to make himself pope. Wily politician that he was, Giuliano realized that there was in fact no chance of a Spaniard or a Frenchman being
elected in the present situation, and he hastened to divest himself publicly of the French connection and to proclaim himself a good Italian. As he told Giustinian, who favoured him as Cesare’s enemy, the day after his arrival: ‘I have come here to look to my own affairs, and not to other people’s. I shall not vote for Rouen [d’Amboise].’ As an election manifesto it was a good one, but Giuliano, although a strong contender, could not persuade Cesare’s Spanish cardinals to give him their votes despite all his blandishments, and his newly acquired pro-Italian platform failed to convince the Italian cardinals. Although they were in the majority – twenty-two out of thirty-seven – they were divided, some for Caraffa, others for Pallavicini, while the others like Colonna, Medici and Soderini followed their French or Spanish masters. D’Amboise, who saw this as his great chance for the tiara, arrived on the 10th, with Ascanio Sforza, who had been released from imprisonment specifically to advance d’Amboise’s candidacy. However, d’Amboise was soon disappointed in Ascanio; the warm welcome given him by the Romans, who remembered the munificent Cardinal Sforza with affection, encouraged him to think well of his own chances. Cries of ‘Ascanio, Ascanio, Sforza, Sforza’ were so deafening that no one could make themselves heard, reported Burchard, adding dryly: ‘How this must have pleased Rouen, God knows!’ Disappointed in Ascanio, d’Amboise probably counted on Cesare to deliver the support of his followers, who were generally admitted to hold the casting vote.
Cesare’s Spanish cardinals had been thrown into disarray by their master’s volte-face in favour of France, but the faithful Agapito had been dispatched from Nepi immediately after Cesare’s arrival there to reassure them and, as he told the Pisan envoy, ‘confirm the Spanish cardinals to the Duke’s will’. The extent of Cesare’s control over ‘his’ cardinals is difficult to determine; it is doubtful whether he could have persuaded all of them to vote for d’Amboise as a Frenchman, and it is probable that in any case he did not want them to, preferring a more controllable candidate than a representative of one of the major powers. It seems likely that he would have instructed them to go through the motions of favouring d’Amboise, as Giustinian reported them to be doing up till two days before the conclave, to try for the election of one of their own number, to block at all costs the candidature of his enemies – Giuliano, Raffaele Riario, and to a lesser extent Ascanio – and if necessary to vote for the most harmless compromise candidate. If these were his instructions, then it appears that Agapito was successful in bringing the Spanish cardinals into line. The conclave opened on 16 September, and in the first ballot on the 21st the Borgia party voted heavily for each other, but nonetheless Giuliano came out ahead. D’Amboise, acting in concert with Ascanio, who was determined to thwart Giuliano, and the cardinals of the French connection, then proposed the Cardinal of Siena, Piccolomini. This compromise was acceptable to the Spanish cardinals, who were equally anxious to see Cesare’s most dangerous enemy defeated, and on the 22nd, without further ado, Piccolomini was elected Pope, taking the name of Pius III, in honour of his uncle Pius II, the friend and protector of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. In the conclave of 1458 which had made Pius II Pope, Rodrigo Borgia’s had been the deciding voice; now, nearly fifty years later, his nephew, thanks to Cesare’s Spanish cardinals, was equally obligated to Rodrigo’s son.
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