Cesare Borgia

by Sarah Bradford

  And so, in the first week of March, Cesare joined King Jean at Viana, a fortified frontier town built in honey-coloured sandstone on a hilltop dominating a rich flat plain stretching southward to the borders of Castile on the River Ebro. Beyond the Ebro, the high Sierras loomed dark against the sky, the edge of the Castilian meseta, a constant reminder of the brooding power of Spain. To the east of the town stood the castle of Viana, garrisoned by de Beaumonte’s eldest son Luis, and from the castle to the south-east a sad, barren stretch of country of low flat-topped sandstone hills, broken by deep gullies, barrancos, divided Viana from Mendavia, where the Count himself was encamped.

  For the man who had taken the great Rocca of I mola from Caterina Sforza, de Beaumonte’s castle of Viana presented an easy target. It was, Cesare knew, weakly garrisoned and short of provisions, and if the Count attempted to rescue his eldest son, then Cesare from his headquarters in the town could fall upon him and cut him to pieces. Both sides expected reinforcements from their respective partisans in Castile, and from their dominating position on the hilltop the royal troops were well placed to intercept help for de Beaumonte coming from the south. But Cesare was overconfident; his summing-up of the situation was correct, but his contempt for this provincial warfare relaxed the wariness which had always been his first line of defence. After only three months in Navarre he underestimated the ingenuity and persistence of his adversary de Beaumonte, the fighting qualities of the Navarrese, and the sudden ferocity of the weather in early spring on the Navarrese uplands. Accustomed to command highly paid mercenaries and to care for their comfort, he was unused to the conditions of a guerrilla civil war in which the participants were tough native partisans, fiercely loyal to their respective leaders and hardened to the vagaries of the weather.

  The weather in that early spring of 1507 was exceptionally bad. On the night of Wednesday, 11 March, a storm of biting winds and torrential rains hit Viana. Cesare, with his usual consideration for his troops, and thinking that the Count was unlikely to make a move on a night such as that, withdrew his sentinels into the town. It was the opportunity for which de Beaumonte had been waiting. Under cover of the stormy darkness he led a convoy of mules loaded with flour and bread escorted by 200 lances and a body of infantry to a point within reach of the castle of Viana. Here he waited with the main body of his troops and sent on the mule train with an escort of sixty horse to enter the castle, which they succeeded in doing unobserved. As the escort were returning from the castle at dawn they made out a body of cavalry coming up the Logroño road, and thinking them to be the reinforcements promised by their Castilian ally the Duke of Najera, raised the cry ‘Beaumonte, Beaumonte!’

  The alarm was given in the town, where the confusion on that dark, windy dawn was tremendous. Accounts of what followed are conflicting, but it seems that Cesare, hastily dressed in light armour, a corselet and helmet by his squire Grasica, leapt on his horse, followed by seventy horsemen, leaving a message for the King to follow him. As he galloped out of the Solana gate his big chestnut charger slipped in the mud and nearly fell. Cesare, swearing, picked up his head with a strong pull on the reins and rode on in a blind fury in the direction of Mendavia, shouting: ‘Where is he, this little Count?’ Better mounted, and a more daring horseman than the rest, he outdistanced his followers, and soon caught sight of the de Beaumonte rearguard retreating to where the Count was waiting. Riding with a furious impetus he did not realize that he was alone. De Beaumonte, observing a lone horseman armed with a great double-pointed lance galloping in pursuit of his rearguard, sent forward three of his knights, ‘the brothers Garcia de Agreda and Pedro de Allo, with some foot-soldiers to intercept him. Waiting in ambush in a narrow ravine, they fell upon Cesare, and as he raised his arm to strike them Ximenes Garcia ran him through the body with a lance thrust under the arm at the point unprotected by the corselet. Unhorsed and mortally wounded, but still grasping his huge lance, Cesare fought desperately against his attackers until he fell, overwhelmed by a mass of men stabbing at him from all sides. At least twenty-five wounds were later found on his body. De Beaumonte’s men stripped him of his brilliant armour, and made off, leaving him lying naked and bleeding in the mud; one of them had the pious thought to cover his genitals with a stone. It was the morning of the twelfth of March, three days short of the Ides which had been fatal to his hero and great namesake, Caesar.

  His attackers were unaware of the identity of the man they had killed, until Cesare’s squire Juanito was found searching desperately for his master. On being shown the armour, Juanito recognized it instantly and burst into tears. De Beaumonte exploded in rage at having lost such a valuable prize as Duke Valentino alive, but there was nothing to be done, the King’s men were approaching and de Beaumonte retreated towards Mendavia, leaving Juanito to lead the royal troops to his master’s corpse. The King had Cesare’s naked, bleeding body covered with a cloak of rough wool and carried to Viana, where the once terrible Duke of Valentinois and of Romagna, ex-Cardinal of Valencia, was buried in the simple parish church of Santa Maria, a corner of the remote kingdom of Navarre. Cesare was only thirty-one when he died, and in those brief years he had achieved the most brilliant successes and known the most stunning reversals of fortune. The inscription on the elaborate marble tomb which was later erected for him was simple and to the point: ‘Here, in a scant piece of earth, lies he whom all the world feared …’

  Cesare’s short life had the proportions of classical tragedy: a meteoric rise to pride and greatness, followed by a dizzy fall to an obscure and violent death. Contemporaries compared his career to the brief, fierce blaze of a sun across the heavens, ending in darkness. Geronimo Casio of Bologna, who had known him, wrote this epitaph:

  Cesare Borgia, che era della gente,

  Per armi et per virtù tenuto un sole;

  Mancar dovendo, andò dove andar sole

  Phebo, verso la sera, a l’occidente.

  ‘Cesare Borgia, whom all for force of arms and valour regarded as a sun, dying, went where sets the sun Phoebus, towards the evening, to the West.’

  He was looked on as a supreme example of the fragility of human ambition, and indeed his life was a failure in terms of achievement. Nothing concrete remained of the years of pride, blood and intrigue, of the driving force of his ambition; even his bones were ejected from the church by a vengeful bishop of Calahorra. His skeleton was interred by the steps of the church, under the Calle de la Rua, the pilgrims’ road to Compostela, where the remains of this godless man were to be trodden by the footsteps of the pious. When the grave thought to be Cesare’s was opened in 1871, the skull crumbled to dust. In death his enemies mocked him with satires playing on his ambitious motto: ‘You conquered all and hoped for all, O Cesare. Now you have lost everything; you have begun to be nothing …’ Yet while he was alive his contemporaries had seen him as more than life-size, because his ambitions were as great as his will to attain them. He was the epitome of an age which believed that ‘a man can do all things if he will’.

  The question must be asked whether Cesare’s ambitious vision of a central Italian state, possibly supported by the hereditary Gonfaloniership which would have given him some form of permanent control over the Papacy, was a feasible one, or merely a megalomaniac fantasy, incapable of realization. The answer, as Machiavelli saw it, was that he would have achieved it, and was on the point of doing so, if only he had had the time. Cesare and his father perceived very clearly that the collapse of the Italian state system and the conflicting ambitions of France and Spain had created a vacuum into which a new Italian power, backed by military force, could be inserted. The Italian states, with the exception of Venice, were too weak and disunited to oppose such an attempt, and Cesare, as the ruler of a central state with a considerable army at his back, could have held the balance between the two powers of France and Spain, who were inevitably doomed to clash.

  Alexander VI, in identifying Cesare’s interests with those of Italy and the Church, was not
entirely mistaken. He saw that only a strong Italian power holding the balance could prevent Italy from either being divided between the two barbarians or being swallowed up by one or the other of them. He was sincere in his urgent appeals to Venice in the winter of 1502 to ally herself to the Papacy to prevent this. Venice reaped the fruit of her jealous blindness six years later on the tragic field of Agnadello, when she was brought to her knees by an alliance of all the powers against her, a defeat which sealed the fate of the last independent Italian state. Alexander was proved right when Charles V’s troops sacked Rome in 1527, an event which signalled the end of the Renaissance Papacy, and it is ironical to think that Cesare, had he lived, might have taken part in that brutal and definitive event, as did his former captain Ugo de Moncada. It is for this reason that historians at the time of the Italian Risorgimento saw Cesare as the symbol of Italy united against the barbarians, a mistakenly flattering conception, since his motives were purely acquisitive. From the historical standpoint Cesare’s achievements were not entirely a failure: he proved that the States of the Church could be held and administered by a single power determined enough to do so, and Julius II’s success in this respect could not have been attained if Cesare had not prepared the way before him. In the short time during which he ruled the Romagna he succeeded in imposing a form of unity on the province which it had never previously enjoyed, and his one administrative innovation, the Rota, persisted in Urbino at least after his fall.

  Why then did he, from his own personal standpoint, fail so absolutely? Machiavelli, in a famous passage from Chapter VII in The Prince, diagnosed the cause of his fall as being principally the extreme malignity of fate:

  So having summed up all that the Duke did, I cannot possibly censure him. Rather, I think I have been right in putting him forward as an example for all those who have acquired power through good fortune and the arms of others. He was a man of high courage and ambition, and he could not have conducted himself other than the way he did; his plans were frustrated only because Alexander’s life was cut short and because of his own sickness … If when Alexander died, he had been well himself, everything would have been easy for him.

  But Machiavelli, despite the fact that he considered his own frustrated life to be due equally to an extreme malignity of fate, knew very well that where human beings are concerned human failings must enter into the question, and he pointed, mistakenly I think, to Cesare’s support of Julius’ election as his fatal error. It is certainly right to argue, as Machiavelli did, that the combination of three unusual strokes of bad luck was enough to cause Cesare’s downfall: the death of his father at a crucial point in his career, above all when combined with his own incapacitating illness; the presence of the armies of France and Spain in the neighbourhood of Rome, which meant that Cesare’s own troops were not, as they might have been and were always intended to be, the deciding force; and finally the existence of an Italian candidate for the Papacy with the qualities of a Julius II.

  Cesare fought back with all his resources aganst these blows of fate, confident that he could once again master Fortune, but in the end it was his own character which was principally responsible for his downfall in 1503. The myth which he himself had created, that ‘dangerous nature of his’, inspired a depth of hatred and mistrust to which he himself seems to have been fatally blind. His own ruthless successes inspired a conspiracy of fear against him, and a determination to destroy him, much the same motives which drove Brutus and his fellow conspirators to the murder of Caesar.

  It has been suggested that Cesare, like Caesar, deliberately went to meet his death in the fields of Viana because, subconsciously, he no longer saw the point of living. Or else that syphilis had affected the motor centres of his brain so that he was to all intents and purposes mad. The syphilitic explanation of his death is dramatic but untenable. Cesare contracted syphilis in 1497, when he was just under twenty-two years of age; the tertiary stage can appear at any time from five to twenty years after the first, and in any case the chances of serious damage from untreated tertiary syphilis appear to be no more than one third. Cesare was thirty-one when he died, and it is extremely unlikely that in ten years the disease would have progressed so as to damage his brain. There is absolutely no evidence of madness in his actions up to the day of his death, and indeed it is not at all certain that he still had syphilis. The only documentary evidence that he did is Giustinian’s statement of 26 April 1504, that Cardinal Carvajal told him that Cesare ‘was not very well for certain pains of the French disease which greatly impeded him: he said his face was ravaged and blotched …’ Syphilis at that time was a new disease, and relatively little was known about it. People tended to attribute almost any illness to it, and indeed it is still known as ‘the great imitator’ for the variety of symptoms which it manifests. As has been pointed out, Cesare’s near fatal illness and his long imprisonment could certainly have caused his ulcerous condition and pains, while there is a strong possibility that the violent bout of tertiary malaria which he suffered in August 1503 finally cured him of the disease.

  That Cesare subconsciously willed his own death implies that he had finally given up and lost faith in his future, but there seem to be no grounds for believing that he did any such thing. Cesare had never lost hope even under the bleakest circumstances; alive and free in Navarre with the certainty of a career with the Emperor before him, there was even less likelihood that he would do so. Nonetheless the explanation of his odd and useless end at Viana remains a difficult one. The Spanish and Italian accounts of it vary substantially if not essentially, so that after nearly five centuries have passed it is impossible to arrive at the truth. Cesare was a man of reckless physical courage and vengeful nature; one has only to recall Bernardi’s description of him on 15 October 1503, riding ‘like a mad dog’ at the Orsinis with the cry ‘Better to die in the saddle than in bed’, to get a picture of Cesare galloping furiously out of the Solana gate of Viana against ‘this little Count’. Bored with the pettiness of small-scale civil war, contemptuous of the provincials who were holding up his return to the international scene, Cesare charged his enemy with the heádlong speed and deadliness of the Borgia fighting bull.

  All that can be certain about Cesare’s end is that he died as he had lived, violently, alone, fighting against the odds. He died, and therefore he failed, but he might have succeeded. Few men are born, as he was, with a sense of their own destiny and a will to achieve it so strong that they are prepared to sacrifice anything to that end, and it is not necessarily a recipe for inevitable failure. The lust for power is as strong and all-consuming as the compulsion of creative genius. Cesare was ruthless, amoral, in many ways a political gangster, if a brilliant one, but the single-minded drive and ability with which he pursued his destiny gave him the qualities of genius. The essence of the man who was Cesare Borgia is expressed in his own prophetic motto: ‘Either Caesar or nothing.’

  Epilogue

  THREE women mourned Cesare’s death: his wife Charlotte, his sister Lucrezia and his mother Vannozza.

  Charlotte d’Albret remains a shadowy figure, and her relationship with her husband mysterious. At the news of his death she plunged herself into a rigid mourning to which she clung for the rest of her life. At the Château of La Motte Feuilly where she lived, the hangings and furniture in the yellow and crimson colours of the Duke of Valentinois were replaced with sombre black cloth, her bright gowns carefully put away in a chest. From then on she wore widow’s weeds and slept in a bed draped in black; even the trappings on her daughter’s Luisa’s pony were changed to the colour of mourning. When Cesare died she was only twenty-five, beautiful and an heiress, but she never remarried, nor did she return to court, but lived out her days in seclusion at La Motte Feuilly, occupying herself with the administration of her estates, charitable works, and occasional visits to her friend, the divorced Jeanne de France, in the Convent of the Annonciades at nearby Bourges. Charlotte was gentle, kindly and pious, her goodness was rema
rked on by more than one observer, and she was a careful administrator who took great interest in her estates and had an acquisitive eye for property (she later bought the lordship of Chalus for 17,000 crowns). But she seems to have been a narrow-minded woman; the few books she owned were all devotional works, and in her enshrinement of her husband’s memory it is possible to see more than a touch of obsessive neurosis.

  She had never made any attempt to go to her husband, even when in the later years of their marriage she was free to do so. The Mantuan envoy to the French court, Jacopo d’Atri, reported that in July and early August 1503 repeated efforts were made to induce her to go to Italy and join her husband, but in vain. Cesare sent a messenger, Artese, to persuade her, and his efforts were strongly seconded by Louis, who at that moment was very much afraid that Cesare was inclining to Spain, and extremely anxious to accommodate him. Louis even threatened to deprive her of her honoured position as governess to his daughter by Anne, Madame Claude, and promised to send Cesare his daughter Luisa, but the envoy said that Charlotte ‘did not want to go to her husband’. She had been deeply shocked by the events at Sinigallia, wrote Francesco Gonzaga, and doubtless by many other reports of Cesare’s activities, including his abduction of Dorotea Caracciolo. And although at a distance she was prepared to do her dutiful best for her husband – in January 1504 the Venetian diarist Sanuto stated that she had come to court specifically to plead for Cesare’s release – she did not join him even when he was at her brother’s court at Pamplona. It would seem that she preferred the mythical memory of the handsome, dashing young husband she had known for those few summer months of 1499 to the harsh reality of the ruthless impious man whom all reports indicated him to be. Cesare’s disgrace after his father’s death no doubt made her position at the French court an embarrassing one, for some time in the autumn of 1503 she negotiated the purchase of the Château de la Motte Feuilly in Touraine, and moved there in 1504. Absorbed in her widowhood, she lived there in retirement until her death on 11 March 1514, aged thirty-two. The inscription on the stone above the place where her heart was buried in the chapel of La Motte Feuilly was perhaps the best expression of Charlotte’s short, unhappy life: ‘Here lies the heart of the most high and powerful lady Charlotte d’Albret, in her life the widow of the most high powerful prince Dom Cesar, Duke of Valentinois, Count of Diois, seigneur of Issoudun and of La Motte Feuilly …’