Cesare was clearly a man capable of inspiring devotion and loyalty in the men who were close to him. Hated, feared and mistrusted as he was by the princes of Italy, his followers did not desert him in the time of his deepest disgrace, when he was a dangerous man to know, whose favours counted for nothing and whose friendship could bring ruin. It needed something more than the charm which had fascinated Louis XII to hold men to him at a time like this. And the men who followed him were not only his Spanish ‘Mafia’ and Michelotto, the tough adventurer from Navarre, known as his executioner, whom Guicciardini described as a ‘monster of iniquity’ and an ‘enemy of God and man’. They included the cardinals who stood by him against the Pope, men like Giovanni Vera, his beloved tutor who had known him all his life, and his secretary, the humanist Agapito Geraldini. Nor were they all Spaniards, like the castellans of the Romagna who defied the Pope and Venice on his behalf, but there were also Italians, such as Taddeo della Volpe of Imola, who was captured by the Florentines with Michelotto and preferred to remain in prison rather than enter their service, and Baldassare Scipione of Siena, who later challenged Gonsalvo de Cordoba in his defence.
Cesare was a born leader, a man of superior and instinctive intelligence, who knew what he wanted in life and never faltered in his pursuit of it; those qualities alone were enough to enable him to dominate others, even men twice his own age. But it was above all his deep confidence in himself that inspired the same feeling in others; when that confidence failed him, as it did only once, briefly, in November, it surprised those who knew him to the extent that Machiavelli doubted his whole reading of the character of the man, and his friend Elna thought him out of his mind.
Indeed it was the continuing loyalty of Cesare’s Spanish cardinals and the castellans of the Romagna which made his position during the period of his imprisonment stronger than it appeared. Two days after he was placed in the Torre Borgia, the cardinals went to the Pope and attempted to obtain his release, pointing out to Julius the danger that if Cesare were not set free the castellans might hand the castles over to the Venetians. Julius retorted that the Venetians might take them by force, but he was on weak ground, and he knew it. The castellans for their part wrote to Cesare assuring him that they could hold out against the Pope or any power in the world, and that they would never give up the fortresses until they saw him completely at liberty. Moreover the decisive defeat of the French by Gonsalvo de Cordoba on the Garigliano in the last week of December meant that French dominion in Naples was at an end, and the Spaniards were now the power to be reckoned with in southern Italy. Consequently the influence of the Spanish cardinals at the Vatican was immeasurably increased, and Julius dared not move against Cesare. As far as the castles were concerned, he had not the troops to take them, and he was indeed very much afraid that Cesare’s castellans might hand them over to Venice in revenge for his treatment of their master. While Cesare professed to have no control over his commanders, Julius was convinced that he sent them secret messages urging them to stand firm.
Cesare no doubt enjoyed the spectacle of Julius’ difficulties, but he was anxious for his liberty, and on 18 January his cardinals came to an agreement with the Pope, promising that he would order the cession of the castles within forty days in return for his freedom and the security of his goods. Rumours of his impending release were enough to send Giustinian hurrying to the Palace to warn Julius:
That Duke Valentino was a person of evil nature; that he still had sufficient funds, however much he might pretend to be poor; he still enjoyed credit and great goodwill with the soldiers, for the great liberty he allowed them to rob and do what they willed, while he also paid them well; therefore he, once set free, would easily be able to gather together many men, and cause enough commotion, that he would cause His Holiness more trouble than perhaps he thought.
Julius did not need Giustinian to tell him what a dangerous man Cesare was, but he wanted the Romagna castles, and it seemed that only by setting him free could he lay his hands upon them. He was weary of the long game he was playing with il Valentino; irritation at his helplessness made him ill, and he complained bitterly of Cesare’s deviousness, saying that ‘he was false, and that he could find no reality in him, and that in this matter he had made so many double plays that His Holiness did not know what foundation to put on it’. Cesare’s cardinals complained equally of the Pope. Giovanni Vera, who was in charge of the negotiations, told Giustinian that he could find no firmness in Julius, that what he said one day he unsaid the next. Giustinian commented exasperatedly: ‘These affairs of il Valentino are more complicated than a labyrinth.’
Indeed they were; on 8 February Giustinian reported that Cesare’s case was desperate, and no one could be sure of his life. Cesare wore a sword at his belt all day and slept with it at the head of his bed by night. Yet a week later he was seen boarding a galley for Ostia, the cardinals having succeeded in persuading Julius to allow him to go there in custody of Bernardino Carvajal, Cardinal of Santa Croce, to be released once the fortresses were handed over. Cesare, delighted at the prospect of liberty, raced his horse up and down the banks of the river before boarding the galley, but once he reached Ostia he found himself under even more rigorous confinement than before. He was not allowed out of the walls of the citadel and alleviated his boredom by firing the castle cannon himself over the empty shore and the desolate valley behind. Once again, at the end of February, the castellans sent envoys back to the Pope with the message that they would not surrender the fortresses until the Duke was a free man. Julius, said Giustinian, told them to go and give them to the Turk, the Venetians or to whom they wished, chased them out of the chamber and went raging into his bedroom.
The matter seemed at deadlock, but Cesare was by now desperate to be free. He was in touch with the Borgia cardinals in Naples, and had plans in mind for his future. On 10 March a new agreement was made, with Cesare again promising to surrender the castles of Cesena and Bertinoro, and to pay the castellan of Forlì 15,000 ducats to give up the Rocca. As far as Cesena and Bertinoro were concerned, he meant what he said, for on payment of 3000 ducats each the Ramires brothers handed over the castles in mid-April. Forlì was another matter. Cesare did not intend to give up his last card yet; moreover the castle contained valuable goods, including the furnishings looted from Guidobaldo, and he did not trust Julius to return them. News of the surrender of Cesena and Bertinoro reached Ostia before it reached Rome, as Cesare’s custodian Carvajal had ensured that it would. Carvajal, who suspected that Julius had really no intention of letting his prisoner go, had already made arrangements for ships and a safe-conduct from Gonsalvo de Cordoba to carry Cesare to Naples, and released him without waiting for permission from the Pope.
The Spanish galleys had been detained in Naples by unfavourable winds, but Cesare was not prepared to wait. On the morning of 19 April he rode out of the castle of Ostia and galloped south to Nettuno, where he took a small rowing-boat, hugging the coast to a point of thirty miles from Naples, making the rest of the journey on horseback. On the 28th he rode into Naples to the house of Cardinal Ludovico Borgia, and was enthusiastically received by the cardinals and Jofre. Even Sancia, who had finally quarrelled with her husband and refused to have him in her house, invited her brother-in-law to dinner. Cesare went, apparently in the role of mediator, but the fiery princess was adamant and the attempt at reconciliation failed.
Cesare, however, had other things to think about than his brother’s marriage problems. The months of imprisonment had told upon him, and he was still not well. Carvajal told Giustinian on 26 April that at Ostia Cesare had been in pain – ‘the French disease in his opinion’ – that his face was ravaged and blotched with pustules, and that he had mocked those who feared him in such a condition. Carvajal was probably mistaken in his diagnosis of syphilis as the cause of Cesare’s condition; tertiary malaria is a recognized modern treatment for the disease, and Cesare’s violent bout of it the previous August should have cured him. The after-
effects of his illness and prolonged confinement could well have been responsible for his state. At Naples he was at last free and full of hope; life seemed to have begun again for him in the warmth and liberty of that early Neapolitan summer, and nothing mattered to him now but the pursuance of his plans.
He had begun his preparations for action even before reaching Naples; from Gaeta he had dispatched letters of credit for his captains in Rome, who hired ships and set off to join him. Giustinian reported on the 25th that ‘the clan’ were leaving every day. Giovanni Vera sent funds to the amount of over 12,000 ducats, while Baldassare da Scipione arrived in Rome to recruit cavalry, declaring publicly that his lord ‘would soon return to good standing and give his enemies food for thought …’ Cesare planned to go by sea either to Pisa, still in desperate straits in her struggle against Florence, or to Piombino, where d’Appiano’s rule seemed insecure. He had given his word to Carvajal not to cause trouble, and specifically not to disturb the States of the Church, but it is impossible to believe that he did not secretly intend to return to the Romagna, where Gonsalvo de Mirafonte still held out for him in the great Rocca of Forlì. He was counting on the support of the Viceroy of Naples, Gonsalvo de Cordoba, who had granted him the safe-conduct to come to Naples. Gonsalvo had done him the honour of a formal visit on the evening of his arrival in Naples, but since then his attitude towards him had been enigmatic. Cesare had high hopes of Gonsalvo and bombarded him with requests for ships, supplies and artillery, but to dispassionate observers it seemed that the ‘Great Captain’ was stalling, ‘stringing him along and feeding him with hope’ as Julius had done. However, on 24 May the Florentine envoy at Naples, Pandolfini, who was extremely worried by Cesare’s obvious intentions concerning Pisa, reported that Gonsalvo had absolutely promised to let him go to Piombino and Pisa with 3000 foot, eight ships and artillery, and that Giulio degli Alberini, one of Cesare’s Roman gentlemen, had been preparing the artillery on the quayside for embarkation. Everything was ready, therefore, when on 26 May, the eve of his departure, Cesare went to the Castel Nuovo to take leave of Gonsalvo. There, that night, as he made to leave, one of Gonsalvo’s gentlemen intimated to him that he was under arrest. Cesare, in surprise and disbelief, ‘gave forth a great cry “Santa Maria! I am betrayed! With me only has my Lord Gonsalvo dealt cruelly.” ’
Cesare, the great deceiver, had been himself deceived, and by the man from whom, perhaps naively, he had least expected it. Years ago, Collenuccio had noted of him that, paradoxically, ‘he set great store by straightforward men’; he had trusted Julius as a man of his word, and he had trusted Gonsalvo, who enjoyed a reputation for being the soul of honour. It may at first sight seem strange that the concept of honour should have had such importance in an age of political and moral unscrupulousness, and to a man like Cesare; less strange, perhaps, if one considers that the same is true of the Sicilian Mafia today. It was a concept handed down from the mythical age of chivalry, which still had a strong hold on the Renaissance imagination. Lies, intrigue, deception and betrayal were one thing, stratagems to be applauded if they succeeded; public honour and the keeping of a solemnly given word were quite another. Mancanza di fede, breaking faith, was the most serious accusation which could be levelled at a man, the charge which the desperate Paolo Orsini had screamed at Cesare at the time of his arrest at Sinigallia, while Cesare himself had justified his action by retorting that the condottieri had been guilty of repeatedly breaking their faith with him. Gonsalvo had given Cesare his sworn safe-conduct to come to Naples, and it is therefore not surprising that Cesare should have relied on it. Gonsalvo’s contemporaries condemned him for thus violating his faith, and Gonsalvo himself was deeply conscious of it. He sent immediately to recover the safe-conduct from Baldassare da Scipione, who had taken refuge in the house of Prospero Colonna, and according to his biographer Giovio his breach of faith with Cesare was one of the three actions of his life which he regretted on his deathbed.
Gonsalvo, the gallant, brilliant soldier, had lured Cesare into a web of international intrigue which stretched from the Vatican to the court of Castile and Aragon. Julius, as everyone at Rome noted, despite the brave face he put upon it, was deeply worried by Cesare’s escape and extremely afraid of what he might do, and he remained obsessed by the idea that he could not be secure as long as il Valentino was at large. The Spanish sovereigns for their part desperately needed two things from the Pope, a dispensation enabling Catherine of Aragon to marry Henry VIII of England and their own investiture with the kingdom of Naples. On the one hand, therefore, they were prepared to do anything to please the Pope, while on the other, since they suspected him of being pro-French, they were content, as the Spanish ambassador at Rome told the Venetian envoy, ‘to keep the Pope in this fear of il Valentino …’ Cesare was a card in the international game, an ace up the Spanish King’s sleeve. The threat of putting him into play would be enough to bring the Pope to heel. And the Spaniards were afraid of what Cesare might do if he joined the French; one of Gonsalvo’s motives for bringing him to Naples was to keep him out of their hands.
Gonsalvo, too, may well have been playing a double game as far as Cesare was concerned. His protectress, Isabella of Castile, was slowly but inexorably dying of terminal cancer of the womb, and he knew that Ferdinand regarded him with jealousy and suspicion. Gonsalvo was an independent man of high ambitions, commanding the absolute loyalty of his troops, and Ferdinand suspected him, not without reason, of aiming at establishing a state for himself in Italy. Gonsalvo had already considered a move against the French in Tuscany through Pisa in concert with Cesare the previous year, and it seems that Cesare at least believed that this plan had been renewed. But as early as March of that year Gonsalvo contemplated undertaking the expedition in person, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility to conjecture that he saw Pisa as a possible lordship for himself. A Pisan envoy, Francesco del Pitta, was negotiating with both Cesare and Gonsalvo simultaneously but independently in Naples in May, and at the end of the month he referred back to his government asking whether they preferred to have the lordship of il Valentino or that of Spain. The government replied on 1 June that, although they would have preferred Spain, ‘if Valentino should come in good order before Spain he would be accepted …’ Pitta was to inform Gonsalvo of this, and if he made no move then they would have il Valentino.
Gonsalvo must have known of these negotiations, and resented them. Perhaps too he now realized that Cesare’s incalculable quality made him impossible even for him to control. He knew that if il Valentino should cause trouble for the Pope in the Romagna he would be blamed for it. At any rate it is clear from a letter which he wrote to de Rojas in Rome on 17 May that he had already made up his mind how to deal with Cesare at least a week before the actual arrest, and certainly before he had finally promised him troops and permission to depart. In this letter he confirmed that he understood the Catholic Kings’ attitude to the Pope and his recovery of the Romagna, and that since they had ordered him to help the Pope he had decided that Cesare should be detained until he surrendered the Rocca of Forlì, and, if necessary, sent in custody to Spain. ‘I desire to be assured of two things,’ he wrote, ‘first whether such a procedure commends itself to your judgement; secondly whether the Pope is willing to request me in writing to carry it into effect.’ He asked for an immediate reply:
… because the Duke of Romagna is pressing me to allow him to depart for Pisa and Piombino, and begs for my aid in ships, men and guns … and I have given him no reason to suspect it will not take place, and we have agreed that next Monday he will depart, and I am keeping him dangling, asking what security he will give me that he will do no disservice to Their Highnesses nor to the Pope, and thus we are carrying on this negotiation …
He ended by warning the envoy that if the Pope agreed to his proposal to arrest Cesare the greatest secrecy must be preserved, ‘because these Cardinals [Borgia and Remolines] have many intimates within His Holiness’ Chamber, and are advised
of everything’. The secret was well kept; on this occasion the Borgia network within the Vatican failed to detect the trap which was being prepared for their leader.
Cesare’s despair at finding himself once again behind bars after a brief month of liberty can only be guessed at. Three days after his arrest he was placed in a room known as ‘the Oven’, which had always been used as a maximum security prison for important captives. His mistress was taken away from him and he was forbidden all communication with the outside world, with the exception of envoys from Gonsalvo who pressed him for the surrender of Forlì. While Cesare sweltered in solitary confinement in ‘the Oven’, the faithful Michelotto suffered under torture in the Roman prison of Torre di. Nona. He had been brought to Rome on 21 May, and Cesare before his own arrest had been making every effort for his release, offering Julius 10,000 ducats to let him go, but now, as the Mantuan envoy remarked, ‘it is another question in both their cases …’ Michelotto was interrogated about the deaths of a long list of people, including Gandia and Alfonso Bisceglie, but even on the rack he apparently refused to implicate Cesare. An official of the Senate wrote to a secretary of Ercole d’Este informing him that they had begun to examine Michelotto with torture concerning the crimes, ‘but up till now he has remained silent and has confessed nothing, I do not know if he will do so … He said that it was Pope Alexander who ordered the death of Don Alfonso [Bisceglie].’ In implicating Alexander, who was beyond harm, Michelotto was undoubtedly shielding Cesare, and it seems that Julius did not succeed in extracting anything incriminating from him, for nothing was made public and he was eventually released. Michelotto’s loyalty contrasted strongly with the callous behaviour of Cesare’s brother Jofre who, Pandolfini reported, was seen every day with Gonsalvo ‘and rides with him in triumph; and to complete his felicity he only needs to recover his wife who refuses to hear anything of it’.
Cesare Borgia Page 34
