Cesare Borgia

by Sarah Bradford

  The tiny independent kingdom of Navarre, the key to the gates of the Pyrenees, was clearly marked out as the victim of the recent alliance between France and Spain. Jean d’Albret, who had gained the throne through his marriage to Catherine de Foix, sister of the late King François Phoebus, who had died without heirs, was now threatened by both Louis and Ferdinand under the terms of the Treaty of Blois. While Ferdinand had his own pro-Castilian party within Navarre, Louis was actively encouraging Catherine’s cousin, Gaston de Foix, in his claims to the Navarrese crown. Cesare, from within the walls of La Mota, was promoting an alliance between Philip and Maximilian on the one hand and d’Albret on the other. For Cesare, Navarre was to be the step towards a new career in the service of the Emperor, a path which he hoped would lead him back to Italy. An agreement between d’Albret and Philip had been signed at Tudela in August, and close connections established with Maximilian during September, when Philip died suddenly of a chill at Burgos on 25 September.

  Philip’s premature death changed the situation overnight. With Philip dead and Juana now in a hopeless condition, aggravated to the point of a macabre mania by his loss, the power in Castile would be that of Ferdinand, who, fortunately for Cesare and the pro-Habsburg party, was now in Italy, where it was noted that he showed no signs of mourning his son-in-law’s death. The heir to the throne, Charles V, was a child of six, far away in Flanders. But Philip’s cause was now the cause of the infant Charles, and the pro-Habsburg party at the Spanish court concocted a plan with Cesare and the imperial ambassadors by which Cesare should go via Navarre to Flanders to bring Charles to Spain. Navarre was to be the Habsburgs’ gate to Spain, and Cesare their instrument. According to the Spanish historian Zurita, Cesare was the moving spirit of the intrigue; he was in close touch with Maximilian’s envoys de Vere and Andreas de Burgo, who had given him signed guarantees that in the case of any future agreement between the Emperor and King Ferdinand, the Emperor would not hand him over to the King.

  For Cesare, the plan, if it was to succeed at all, must be put into immediate action. He knew that Bernardino de Cardenas, wishing to ingratiate himself with Ferdinand, had intimated to his envoy Ferrer that he was now willing to hand over Cesare. Ferrer had accepted the offer in principle, but said that he must write to Ferdinand to find out what he wanted done with the prisoner. For Cesare, his future with Maximilian represented his last chance of the power and destiny he still believed in, a chance which might be lost if he waited until Ferdinand’s orders reached Medina. In conjunction with his partisan, the Count of Benavente, he therefore planned to dare the impossible – an escape from La Mota.

  Benavente, says Zurita, was so determined to get Cesare out of La Mota and Ferdinand’s hands that he was prepared to attack the castle and murder the governor to achieve it. However, it was undoubtedly Cesare who planned the method of his escape – more secret, and also he thought more sure, than a bloody skirmish which might fail in its purpose. It also required more personal daring, a quality which he had never lacked. The plan was to follow the lines of his abortive escape from Chinchilla, but it was more carefully prepared, and made easier by the fact that since Philip’s accession to the regency the governor de Cardenas had regarded Cesare as a possible future commander of the royal troops; in agreement with Philip he had therefore provided him with numerous servants and a personal chaplain. The chaplain now acted as the go-between for Cesare and Benavente, while Cesare had succeeded in suborning one of the servants of Don Gabriel de Tapia, the administrator of La Mota, to provide the ropes for the escape.

  On the night of 25 October, at the appointed hour, three men, one of them the chaplain, waited for Cesare in the darkness of the fosse beneath the keep. A rope was let down from the narrow pointed window of the room at the top of the tower in which he was lodged. One of his servants was first down the rope, but it was too short for the great height, and on reaching the end he fell, injuring himself severely. Cesare followed, but the alarm had been given and the rope was cut from above, precipitating him into the fosse. It was a brutal fall; unable to stand, Cesare had to be carried to the waiting horses and lifted on to the saddle. There was no time to rescue the wretched servant, who was found by the castle guards lying in the fosse and executed on the spot. Cesare, unconscious from his fall, was unable to hold himself on the horse, but his companions somehow managed to support him and galloped off with him into the night to the safety of Benavente’s lordship of Villalon.

  Cesare lay low at Villalon for a month, recovering from his injuries, before setting out for Navarre towards the end of November. Accompanied by two guides, Martin de la Borda and his brother-in-law Miguel de la Torre, Cesare rode out of Villalon on a big bay horse with a white star on its forehead. They made straight for the Atlantic coast, since the direct route to Pamplona, leading through Burgos where the court was, was considered too risky. The three men rode hard, and by the time they reached Castres, a little town outside Santander, their horses foundered and they were forced to make their way into Santander on foot. At Santander, Cesare sent de la Torre to find an inn and order dinner, while he went to negotiate with the owner of a boat for the journey to Navarre. Although the alarm for his escape had not yet been given, Cesare’s ill-concealed urgency, his strange desire to undertake a perilous journey on the stormy December seas, and the large sums of money he was prepared to pay for a boat, aroused the suspicions of a witness who hurried to inform the corregidor. Cesare and his companions were sitting down to a welcome meal of ‘three fowls and a large joint of meat’, when the corregidor’s lieutenant arrived hot-foot to question them. On being questioned separately the three men told the story which they had previously concocted to explain their obvious urgency and the large sums of ready cash which they had with them. They were, they said, corn merchants who had been to Medina to collect money owing them, and had come to Santander to meet one of their ships loaded with grain from France. Now they had discovered that their ship was at Bernico, further up the coast, and they must make their way there with all haste lest the corn should be spoiled. The sight of their money convinced the corregidor’s lieutenant that they were men of standing, and, having no reason to suspect them, he let them finish their dinner in peace.

  Later, when the royal hunt for Cesare was on (for some reason no official attempts to find him were made until 14 December, when Juana signed a royal warrant for his arrest at Burgos), witnesses, their imagination sharpened by the knowledge of the identity of the fugitive, gave strange descriptions of him to the inquiring officials. The innkeeper at Santander said that one of the three was clearly distinguished from the others, kept himself all wrapped up in a cloak, that he was short and heavy with flaring nostrils and big eyes, and that one of his hands was bandaged. A witness at Castres, where they abandoned the horses, described him as ‘a man doubled up, with an ugly face, a big nose, dark …’ Poor Cesare, once the handsomest man in Italy, now perhaps still crippled by his fall, with his looks ruined by illness and imprisonment, struck a simple Spanish villager as ugly. But he still stood out from his companions by his bearing and his air of a grand seigneur; another witness corroborating the evidence of the Santander innkeeper said that he did not seem to be ‘of the same race’ as the two other men.

  The corregidor’s visit impressed the fugitives with the need to leave Spanish soil as soon as they could, and at two in the morning they were on the quayside, hoping to embark, but the sea was so rough even within the harbour that they were forced to wait for sunrise to depart. Once outside, conditions were so bad that the captain refused to take them beyond Castro Urdiales a few miles to the west of Bilbao, and still short of their objective, Bernico. Castro Urdiales was a poor fishing village, and horses could not be found, so that Cesare, chafing with impatience, was obliged to spend two days there, until his men managed to persuade a neighbouring monastery to hire them three mules. Followed by an anxious muleteer who besought them not to ruin his animals, they rode hard to Durango and then by devious rout
es through mountain villages to Pamplona, where Cesare appeared ‘like the devil’ on 3 December.

  Pamplona, the fierce walled capital of the kingdom of Navarre, set on a high plateau ringed by mountains, defied the great kingdoms of France to the north across the Pyrenees, and of Castile and Aragon to the south beyond the Sierras. Its people were tough independent Basques, fighting men who welcomed Cesare as a man after their own hearts. It was ironical that he should now appear in Pamplona as a leader in the cause of Navarrese independence; fifteen years previously he had been their Bishop, resisted by his flock as the symbol of foreign interference in their affairs. In September 1491, when he was just sixteen, Cesare had been nominated Bishop of Pamplona by Innocent VIII, at the instigation of his father Rodrigo, backed by Ferdinand of Aragon, anxious to extend his own influence in Navarre. His appointment had roused the furious opposition of his future brother-in-law, Jean d’Albret, who had not been consulted, and saw it not only as an infringement of his rights as sovereign but as yet another instance of the thin end of the Spanish wedge within his kingdom. Indeed, Cesare’s first vicar-general, Martin Zapata, had been a familiar not only of Rodrigo Borgia but also of King Ferdinand. The teenage absentee Bishop’s tenure of his see had been brief and unmemorable; after only twelve months he vacated it for the wealthier archbishopric of Valencia, and not one single act in the cathedral archives at Pamplona bears his signature as Bishop. Now, at thirty-one, Cesare was setting foot for the first time in his former diocese to wield the sword for Jean d’Albret against the cause of Ferdinand of Aragon in Navarre.

  But Cesare was not really interested in Spanish politics. He regarded Navarre as merely a step towards the future he yearned for. From Pamplona his thoughts strayed far away to the centre of the international stage – to Italy, where he was determined to return. Through the favour of the Habsburg party in Spain, and that of friendly cardinals such as Carvajal, who was in close touch with the Emperor, he hoped to enter Maximilian’s service and thus return to Italy. Already in August of that year Maximilian had announced to an appalled Julius II his intention of making an armed expedition to Rome for the purpose of his coronation as Emperor. Cesare knew too of Maximilian’s extreme hostility towards Venice, an attitude which was shared by the other powers, France, Spain and the Papacy, and that the possibility of a League against her had already been discussed. Fighting in Maximilian’s service he might have the chance to revenge himself on Venice, which had taken from him his states of the Romagna.

  Four days after he arrived in Pamplona, he sat down to write a flood of letters to Italy, announcing his escape from Medina and his safe arrival at the court of Navarre. He wrote to Francesco Gonzaga, to Ippolito d’Este and doubtless to Lucrezia, who had already heard the news in late November, for an entry in her household expenses for 20 November 1506 reads: ‘To Garzia, a Spaniard, to go to Venice concerning the news of Duke Valentino who has escaped from prison,’ and on the 27th she wrote to inform Francesco Gonzaga, with whom she was now on very intimate terms. According to Bernardi, Cesare, with the dream of a return to the Romagna always in his mind, also wrote to Antonio da Monte, once his right-hand man there and President of the Rota, now in the service of Julius II. He signed his letters from Pamplona in his usual style, ‘Cesar Borgia de Francia, duca di Romagna’, but in fact they were empty titles: Cesare had not, in Julius’ words, ‘one rampart in the Romagna’, and Louis had stripped him of his French titles and lordships. And he had lost almost all his fortune; Julius had seized the deposits which his treasurer Spanocchi had carefully distributed among the Italian banking houses, and sequestrated the treasure which Florence and Bentivoglio had seized from him. He was desperate for money; in November he sent his major-domo, Requerenz, to the French court at Bourges to request the restitution of his duchy of Valentinois, and to ask permission for him to come to court and take up his sword once again in Louis’ service. Charlotte almost certainly travelled from her château nearby at La Motte-Feuilly to support Requerenz’s mission, but both were met by a blunt refusal. As far as d’Amboise and Louis were concerned, Cesare had changed sides once too often; he was an enemy of their new ally Ferdinand, and, they thought, a finished man, thus no longer of use to them.

  Cesare’s mission to Louis shows that experience had not changed him; he still would not recognize the truth in Machiavelli’s dictum: ‘Whoever believes that with great men new services wipe out old injuries deceives himself.’ His supreme belief in himself made him an admirable con-man; penniless and landless as he was, he convinced others that, despite the fact that his luck seemed to have turned against him, he was still a man to be reckoned with. Navarre was a remote kingdom in the north-eastern corner of the Iberian peninsula, and the court of the genial easy-going King Jean poor and unsophisticated in comparison with the splendours he had been accustomed to in Italy, but to Cesare, alive and free in the heady upland air of Pamplona after three years of almost continuous imprisonment, everything once again seemed possible.

  He was not alone in his belief. News of his escape caused consternation in Italy, and especially to his old enemy Pope Julius, who at that very moment was engaged at the head of a small army in ousting Cesare’s former antagonists Gian Paolo Baglioni and Giovanni Bentivoglio from Perugia and Bologna and asserting his control over those parts of the Romagna not held by the Venetians. In the words of Ferdinand’s historian Zurita, the news of il Valentino’s escape ‘put the Pope in great consternation, because the Duke was such a man that only his presence was sufficient to raise new trouble in all Italy; and he was greatly loved, not only by the soldiery, but also by many people of Tuscany and the States of the Church’. For Julius, triumphantly ensconced in Bologna, the news that the popular Duke of Romagna whom he had thought safely locked away in a Spanish prison was once again at large came as an extremely disagreeable surprise. He was immediately on the alert for signs that il Valentino might be planning to stir up trouble for him in the area, and when the bearer of Cesare’s letters, his chancellor Federigo, after an interview with Lucrezia at Ferrara on 28 December, unwisely came to Bologna bringing his master’s letter for Gonzaga, he promptly had him seized. Lucrezia, always energetic in defence of her adored brother’s interests, wrote to Gonzaga, now Captain of the papal forces and also very probably her lover, pleading for Federigo’s release in the most ingenuous terms. Federigo, she said, had come to Italy simply to inform them of Cesare’s escape, and with no intention of doing anything which might displease or injure the Pope. Cesare, she said, ‘would never countenance nor would he dare anything of this sort against His Holiness’; Federigo’s arrest was excessively displeasing to her ‘because it will injure my brother the Duke, making it appear that he is not in His Holiness’s favour, and the same may be said of myself …’ Lucrezia can hardly have thought seriously that Julius would look on her brother with favour after what had happened between them in the past, and knowing Cesare as she did, neither she nor anyone else can have been under any illusion that he did not intend to return to Italy and fight for what had once been his.

  However, before Cesare could think of planning a return to Italy he was bound to play his part in bringing back the infant Charles V to be recognized as ruler of Castile under the tutelage of Maximilian. Cesare was anxious to put this ambitious plan into execution, but before he could do so civil war erupted in Navarre, precipitated by the insubordination of the leader of Ferdinand’s party there, Luis de Beaumonte.

  Luis de Beaumonte y Luza, Constable of Navarre and Count of Lerins, was a typical Navarrese, a fiery little man, ‘with a small body and a high heart’ in the words of a contemporary cancionero. Although he was nearing seventy he was still restless, turbulent and insatiably ambitious. Since 1505 he had held the castle of Viana in Ferdinand’s name, and made of his territories a petty kingdom within a kingdom, raiding and annexing his neighbours’ lands, ignoring the edicts of the royal council, regarding himself as answerable only to Ferdinand of Aragon or to himself, and generally behav
ing as though King Jean did not exist. When, towards the end of 1506, Jean and Cesare resolved to put the country on a war footing in anticipation of trouble from both France and Spain, the King ordered de Beaumonte to surrender the fortress of Viana. De Beaumonte beat the royal envoy, threw him into prison and refused to give up the castle. The King then sent three times to summon him to appear at court and answer for his actions, and when after the third summons he still refused to appear, condemned him on the grounds of lèse majesté and sentenced him to death with loss of all his lands and titles. With Ferdinand far away in Italy, the moment was obviously opportune for d’Albret to crush his party’s leader once and for all. With this object in mind, he appointed Cesare Captain General of the royal troops.

  Early in February 1507, at the head of the royal forces, Cesare took the field again for the first time in four years to teach the rebel count a lesson. It was not, by Italian standards, a large army – some 200 light cavalry, one hundred and thirty men at arms, 5000 infantry and some artillery – and could hardly have been compared with the eight or nine thousand trained troops under his command in that last glorious summer of 1503. But it was an army at last, and Cesare, with the memory of his Italian successes behind him, was confident that he would be able to deal swiftly and easily with a belligerent provincial count. Many years later an old man remembered seeing Cesare pass through his village of Mendigorria at the head of his troops on his way to besiege Beaumonte’s castle of Larriaga. He was, he said, ‘a big man, strong, handsome, and soro’, an untranslatable word used to describe young falcons. He was carrying a short, thick double-pointed lance, a most unusual weapon which is specifically mentioned by other chroniclers of Cesare in Navarre. Thus it seems that Cesare, towering above the short Navarrese knights, was once again in the fullness of health, strength and confidence as he found himself again at war. But the castle of Larriaga resisted fiercely, and he decided to raise the siege and to make a direct attack on the Count himself. ‘The impatience of the Duke suffered no delays,’ recorded the Navarrese chronicler Padre Moret, ‘it being his mind to finish speedily with this war in order to undertake as soon as possible his journey to Flanders.’