Still Cesare continued to raise troops and make plans for his departure to the Romagna, almost as if he did not know what else to do. As the Romagna slipped from his grasp so its recovery became an even greater obsession with him. He clutched at the hope that he would be confirmed Gonfalonier and Captain General in the first consistory to be held on 9 November, and it seems that Julius had encouraged him in this, outwardly favouring him although secretly working against him. Giustinian reported on the day of the consistory: ‘His Beatitude intends to propose in Consistory this matter of the Captainship for the Duke, but not with the intention that it should take place; since from a good source I hear that he has given to understand to those cardinals to whom he can speak confidentially, that they should oppose it, because, although he might propose it, it is not his will, but he does not wish to be seen to break his faith with the Duke …’ When the meeting took place, not a word was said about Cesare or his nomination. Cesare was disappointed, but not yet despairing; he continued to hope that he would be nominated in the end, and Julius seems to have been encouraging him to leave, even promising to lend him papal galleys for his journey by sea to La Spezia, and writing a brief to Florence recommending that they grant him a safe-conduct for his troops through Tuscan territory.
Giustinian was puzzled by these demonstrations of favour. ‘I find the Pope’s mind ambiguous,’ he wrote on 11 November, ‘for in conversation with me it seems he is badly disposed towards the Duke and desires his ruin … on the other hand … he lends him galleys to take him where he wills, recommended in no otherwise than if he were his own son.’ Julius’ true attitude to Cesare’s departure emerged a week later when he told the Venetian that he was letting him go ‘because we believe that perhaps he will be attacked and pillaged …’ Cesare, however, convinced of the Pope’s sincerity, was once again full of hope; he had promises of troops from d’Amboise and the Duke of Ferrara, and still counted on help from the Florentines. Machiavelli, in an interview with him on 11 November, found him calm and conciliatory, urging Florence to forget the past and join with him in action against Venice. He planned to send his cavalry under Michelotto by land through Tuscany, and to go himself with the infantry by sea to Livorno or Piombino to join up with the cavalry in Florentine territory, before proceeding via Ferrara to the Romagna. The feasibility of the entire plan depended upon the attitude of the Florentine government.
But Florence, much as she hated Venice and was jealous of her success in the Romagna, was even more afraid of il Valentino. The citizens, the Ten wrote to Machiavelli, would never consent to allow Cesare into Tuscany again ‘because it would renew the memory of that other passage of his, and the fear occasioned by his behaviour at that time’. Cesare, they continued, was not desirable as a neighbour and could not be counted on for long, and they urged their envoy to explain their decision to the Pope on the grounds of ‘the dangerous nature of the man’. No doubt Machiavelli’s dispatches had given the Florentines good reason to think that their refusal of a safe-conduct for Cesare would not be displeasing to the Pope, and in fact Julius admitted as much to Machiavelli on 18 November: ‘He said it was well thus and that he was in agreement with you.’
The news that Florence had refused the safe-conduct, which Cesare received on the 14th, came as a stunning and unexpected blow, throwing him down from his precarious heights of confidence. Now, perhaps for the first time, he was forced to admit to himself the strength of the forces against him, and the depth of their ill will. He realized that the two powers on whom he had counted for support, Julius and Florence, far from helping him were actually working against him. This last blow to his hopes seems to have had a catalytic effect on him, releasing all the fears, despair and tension which he had held down within himself over the past three difficult and dangerous months. He had been under continual pressure since his father’s death and his own illness, which had given him no chance of recuperating his strength sapped by fever. He had managed to build up for himself a fragile edifice of confidence and hope. Now that it was shattered he lost his self-control and power of decision, plunged in a whirlpool of self-doubt and irresolution. If he was not on the verge of a breakdown, he was near to it. Men found him unrecognizable: Soderini described him to Machiavelli as ‘inconstant, irresolute, and suspicious, and not standing firm in any decision’; even his friend the Cardinal of Elna told the envoy ‘that he believed the Duke out of his mind: not knowing what he wanted to do, he was confused and irresolute …’ Machiavelli, hearing their reports, wondered whether he had been wrong about Cesare all along, whether the picture he had built up of him had been nothing but a mirage, and that the real Cesare was not the man he had seen at Urbino, Imola and Sinigallia, coolly confronting Fortune, but the bewildered, near-hysterical creature of that Roman November. He could not decide ‘whether he was so by nature, or because these blows from Fortune have stunned him, and since he is unaccustomed to receive them, his mind is confused …’ Cesare’s behaviour in an interview with Machiavelli on the 18th was indeed that of a man who has lost touch with reality. He raged at the envoy, threatening that if the Florentines did not give him a safe-conduct, ‘he would come to an agreement with the Venetians or with the devil, and he would go to Pisa, and all the money and friends he had left he would employ in doing [them] harm’. Machiavelli cynically assured him that Florence was only delaying in order to have details of an agreement and encouraged him to send his agent there. ‘I have assured the Duke,’ he wrote to the Ten, ‘only to give him a bit of hope, that he may not have to delay, and the Pope will not therefore have to urge you to give him a safe-conduct. Your Lordships, when the Duke’s man comes, can treat him negligently, and conduct yourselves as you think best. …’
Cesare, who had always shown a supreme ability to adapt his plans to changing circumstances, now seemed incapable of finding an alternative, blundering blindly down the road he had set himself because he could not think what else to do. He had already made a dangerous mistake in sending off his cavalry by land without a definite safe-conduct from Florence: without that safe-conduct and assurances of a friendly reception for himself and his forces from the Florentines, his whole plan for going to the Romagna was no longer feasible. The Tuscan route was the only way open to him by land; to go through Umbria and Urbino, held by the Baglionis and Guidobaldo, was clearly unthinkable. Now that it was no longer safe, he should have abandoned the idea. In fact by then it was probably too late to go to the Romagna with the few forces he had; he had lost most of his cities and the Venetians were attacking in strength and about to take Faenza. He would have been better advised to take the safe course, join the French in the Kingdom and wait for better times in the future. But Cesare had still not lost his will to fight against Fortune. He was still a gambler; he could not bear to give up the idea of his Romagna dukedom, and possibly, like an animal in a trap, he instinctively longed to be among his own people, on his own ground. It was the blind reaction of the Borgia fighting bull at bay to charge, head down, at the enemy; he could no longer bear to remain inactive in hostile terrain. He felt now as he had when he had ridden out against the Orsinis in October: ‘Better to die in the saddle than in bed.’ And so, on 19 November, he left Rome for Ostia, ‘to the pleasure of all this city’, wrote Machiavelli, adding that, since he had already sent off his cavalry without a safe-conduct, ‘everybody here laughs at his affairs’.
Even as Cesare was waiting at Ostia for a favourable wind to carry him northward to Tuscany, a further stroke of bad luck befell him. On the 20th news reached Rome of the surrender of Faenza to the Venetians, who were blockading Imola and overrunning its contado. The report shocked Julius into a sudden overnight decision: the fortresses still held by Cesare in the Romagna must be placed in the hands of the Church. On the morning of the 21st a messenger was dispatched to Ostia ordering Cesare not to leave, and on the 22nd Cardinals Soderini and Remolines were sent there to demand the cession of the fortresses. Cesare, buoyed up by the prospect of departure, bluntl
y refused to give them up. His refusal threw Julius into one of his violent rages; a messenger was dispatched to Ostia to order Cesare’s arrest, and the Pope’s anger was such that Machiavelli thought that Cesare in refusing to hand over the castles had signed his own death-warrant. There were rumours that he had already been murdered: a courtier told Machiavelli on the 26th that the previous day two men had arrived from Ostia, and that on their arrival everyone had been ordered out of the room, but that they had been overheard telling the Pope that Cesare had been thrown into the Tiber as he had ordered. Machiavelli did not know whether or not the story was true, but, he wrote: ‘I do believe that if it has not happened, it will. And now we see how honourably this Pope is already paying his debts, and how he wipes them out as with a sponge …’ He regarded Cesare as finished: ‘Since the Duke is taken, whether dead or alive, we can now act regardless of him …’
On the 29th Cesare was brought back to Rome under strong guard, and lodged, a virtual prisoner, in the apartments occupied by d’Amboise that had once been his own. It was the beginning of a long cat-and-mouse game to be played between Julius and Cesare, in which the prizes for the Pope were the Romagna castles, and for Cesare his life and liberty. On 1 December news came that Michelotto with Carlo Baglioni and Cesare’s cavalry had been surrounded and captured by Tuscan peasants near Arezzo. This report, wrote Machiavelli, threw the Pope into ecstasies, ‘since it seemed to him that by the capture of that man he had the chance to uncover all the cruelties of robberies, homicides, sacrileges and other infinite evils, which over the past eleven years … have been done in Rome against God and man.’ Julius told Machiavelli merrily that he was looking forward to talking to Michelotto ‘to learn some tricks from him, so as to enable him the better to govern the Church’ and that he hoped to have him in Rome in good time in order to make use of him in his coronation procession. It was not only for the imperial pleasure of seeing his enemy’s chief executioner marching captive in his triumphal procession that Julius was so anxious to have him in his hands. Michelotto, more than any man alive, knew the darkest secrets of Cesare’s past, and no doubt his evidence could have condemned his master a hundred times over. For the moment, however, the Florentines kept Michelotto, and Julius could not make use of him.
For Cesare, the capture of Michelotto and the cavalry was the final blow which destroyed his hopes and his will to resist. In his desperation to find a friend amongst the enemies who surrounded him, he even turned to the man whom he had injured most of all, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, who had arrived in Rome to press claims for indemnity against Cesare. The interview between the two men took place on 2 December, and the only detailed account of it appeared in a letter sent from Rome to Urbino a few days later, which depicted Cesare as grovelling cap in hand before the Duke of Urbino, begging his forgiveness and cursing and blaming his father for the taking of the duchy, while Guidobaldo, with Christ-like magnanimity, raised Cesare from his knees and embraced him. Cesare was a desperate man; he was also a consummate actor, and it is not out of character that he should have put on such a show to arouse pity in the kind-hearted Guidobaldo. However, Giustinian, who was informed of the interview by Guidobaldo himself, and who would have been the first to retail the enjoyable spectacle of a grovelling Valentino, makes no mention of such a story. The letter to Urbino was probably an imaginative illustration of the discussion which certainly took place, when Cesare promised to restore all the treasures which he had looted from Urbino with the exception of the famous Trojan tapestries which he had presented to d’Amboise. He also promised to hand over the countersigns (the equivalent of passwords) of his Romagna castles to Guidobaldo in the Pope’s name, which he did on the next day. On 4 December, the papal commissioner, accompanied by one of Cesare’s men, Pedro de Oviedo, set out for the Romagna, armed with the countersigns. In return, Cesare got nothing from Julius beyond the promise of liberty and immunity of person and goods, a pledge which the wily d’Amboise understandably refused to guarantee. Machiavelli now thought that Cesare had played his last card, and that nothing stood between him and the abyss. ‘It seems to me,’ he wrote on 3 December, ‘that this Duke, little by little, is slipping down to the grave.’
Machiavelli, when he left Rome in mid-December, thought that Cesare was not long for this world, and Giustinian, with deep satisfaction, was of the same opinion. Indeed things looked extremely black for him. On 6 December his admittedly unwilling protector, d’Amboise, left for France; Cesare had hoped to go with him, but as yet no news had been heard from the messengers sent to take over the Romagna castles, and he was not allowed to leave. Now, in Giustinian’s words, he was bereft of everyone, and his enemies gathered like vultures to strip the fallen Duke of all he had left. Encouraged by the Pope, they put in huge compensation claims for damages against him – the Riarios asked for 50,000 ducats, Guidobaldo for 200,000, and Florence and Bentivoglio joined in the game. Julius for his part was eagerly gathering evidence to justify legal proceedings against him. On 14 December the late Cardinal Michiel’s majordomo was arrested on suspicion of poisoning his master on Cesare’s orders; Machiavelli noted in his dispatch: ‘Now they are beginning to investigate these affairs …’
Giustinian hastened to claim Dorotea Caracciolo, who it appears had been placed in a convent after Alexander’s death, although, according to the Mantuan envoy Cattaneo, Cesare continued to disclaim all knowledge of her. Giustinian reported that she feared for her life, and requested some form of guarantee from Venice, otherwise she preferred to remain there for the rest of her days. Dorotea herself, according to Sanuto, wrote to Venice thanking them for their envoy’s efforts for her release ‘from the hell in which she had been for the past three years’, begging them to see that her husband would promise to treat her well, else she would return to her mother’s house. Dorotea’s nervousness as to her reception was understandable; she had been with Cesare for over two years as his mistress, willing or unwilling, and no doubt feared that reprisals might be taken against her for her liaison. However, some guarantee must have been given her, for she later left Rome, and on 4 February 1504 arrived at Faenza, where ‘the captain her husband received her joyfully’. Caracciolo, who was now approaching his mid-fifties, and must have known himself a cuckold, presumably tactfully refrained from questioning his young wife about her experiences with Cesare Borgia, for she later bore him four children.
Dorotea’s alleged abductor, Diego Ramires, with his brother Pedro, were castellans of the citadel of Cesena, where the envoys bearing the countersigns arrived in mid-December after a dreadful journey through the snowy Apennine passes. The Ramires brothers refused to recognize the countersigns, accused the wretched de Oviedo of treachery to his master, beat him, and hanged him from the castle walls. They then dispatched the papal envoy back to his master with the message that, having held the fortresses for the Duke in the time of his prosperity, it did not seem to them the office of good servants to break faith with him now that they saw him detained and pressed to do that which he did not wish. They would only give them up if Cesare was set free and ordered them to do so, and added, as a warning to Julius, that ‘as long as the Duke is detained, they are resolved not to give the fortresses in to the hands of his enemies [by which they meant the Pope himself], but to others …’ The castellans’ proud answer nearly cost their master his life. Julius ‘raged like the devil’, threatening to throw Cesare into Castel Sant’Angelo to end his days there, and only the pleas of his friends the Spanish cardinals saved him once again. Instead, as a concession to the growing power of Spain, on 20 December he was locked up in the Torre Borgia, in the same room in which three years before Alfonso Bisceglie had been strangled on his orders, a grim reminder, perhaps, that he might well come to the same end.
Cesare’s detention threw the Borgia party in Rome into panic. Cardinals Ludovico Borgia and Remolines da Ilerda fled to Naples with Jofre, taking the young Borgia Dukes and possibly Cesare’s illegitimate children with them. The news that her son
had been brought prisoner back to Rome on 28 November had already caused Vannozza, with the cautious instincts of a woman of property, to transfer the deeds of her house on Piazza Pizzo di Merlo to the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, reserving the use of it during her lifetime. The act was signed on 4 December, and was undoubtedly a precaution against the possibility of a general confiscation of Borgia possessions by the Pope. At about the same time she must have persuaded Cesare to perform the only known pious act of his life, the founding of a ward for elderly and infirm women (many of whom were superannuated prostitutes), attached to the Hospital of the Consolazione, a charity with which Vannozza herself was much concerned. Cesare, with the possibility of sudden death before him, may have seen this donation in the nature of a bribe to the heavenly power to whom he had hitherto paid scant attention. Meanwhile the Borgias took care to protect his earthly possessions. Two convoys of waggons loaded with his goods, one from the houses of Vannozza and the fugitive cardinals at Rome, the other from Cesena, were dispatched for Lucrezia’s safe keeping at Ferrara. Neither reached its destination: the Florentines seized the Roman train as it passed through Tuscany, while Giovanni Bentivoglio fell upon the Cesena convoy and had the goods taken to his own house. Bentivoglio’s loot included many of the things seized by Michelotto in Alexander’s room on the day of his death – the jewel-studded mantle of St Peter, altarpieces, tabernacles, cups worked in gold and emeralds, eighty huge pearls, and ‘a cat in gold with two most noble diamonds as its eyes’.
Cesare himself, shut up in the Torre Borgia, in the face of the apparent final ruin of his hopes and in very real danger of his life, seemed not to feel this new blow of fate. He had recovered his mental balance, and his courage and calm strength of spirit impressed even his enemies. Giustinian admitted with grudging admiration that, despite Julius’ pressure and his own desperate situation, ‘his spirit does not bend’. Cesare, he reported, spent his days watching his friends and servants gambling as if nothing else mattered in the world. Cesare’s courage was never questioned, but it is here, in prison, that we have a glimpse of those other qualities that made him the man he was: a refusal to give up even under the worst possible circumstances, a sardonic intelligence that enabled him to take a detached view of life, even his own, and to joke about it. Cattaneo reported that on 10 February a group of Vatican courtiers went to sup with Cesare in the Torre Borgia and that after supper they began to play a game in which each one in turn said the thing that amazed him most. A Roman named de Margano, who had once been imprisoned for taking one of Cesare’s women, began: ‘I marvel that a man who is in here can be in such good humour …’ Cesare, who, says Cattaneo, never lost his wit, answered: ‘You ask me why I am here, I am so in memory of you and of some others whom I made in a worse humour.’ Then they drew lots as it were for the parts of a sheep, each to say his part, one saying my wool will be cut off, the other my tail will be cut off and so on; the head fell to Cesare, who hesitated and seemed not to want to say his piece, then he too said ‘my head will be cut off’, as if defying fate. And while they were dining, he told them: ‘Don’t be afraid of being poisoned!’ To one of Julius’ men who said to him: ‘Lord Duke, you were always full of confidence,’ he gave a telling reply: ‘The more I am in adversity, the more I fortify my spirit.’
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