In the Name of the Family

by Sarah Dunant

  Except Niccolò’s briefing the night before, from Florence’s own Cardinal Soderini, had told a different story. While the duke might not yet be utterly defeated—he still had troops outside Rome and a war chest plundered from the papal apartments—he had no cards left to play. Half of his cities in the Romagna had been retaken by Venice, drawn like a vulture to the smell of carrion, and those cardinals whose votes he did control—seven, eight at most—were all Spaniards, and like the French could have no ambition for themselves.

  After a decade of invasions and wars, neither the Church nor Italy would stomach another foreign pope. Which left the Italians. And out of them, just one had the requisite purse and ruthlessness to take the crown. Giuliano della Rovere needed only a handful of extra votes to turn the tide his way. And he’d waited too long for this moment to let a weakened Cesare Borgia stand in his way.

  “He can’t do it without me, but I tell you, I do not sell myself cheap. In return for my cardinals’ votes, della Rovere has promised to confirm me as the captain general of the papal forces and guarantee the security of my cities in the Romagna. A fair deal, wouldn’t you say?”

  Niccolò had been so stunned he had found it hard to reply. What man in his right mind would keep such a promise against a sworn enemy once he had the prize in his hands? Cesare Borgia would not have done it, that was for sure. Not now, not once, not ever. In which case, how could he possibly believe it of another?

  “What, Signor Smile? No thoughts on this? Perhaps you think I cannot win back my states? Give me six weeks and even half my men, and they will be mine again. Della Rovere needs a warrior to push back the Venetians, and he knows there is no better one than me.”

  No man in his right mind…

  As he listened, Niccolò had noted the sweat building on the duke’s forehead. Raving for six days. That is what all the dispatches had said. Six days of boiling blood before his doctor finally saved his life by plunging him into iced water. Violence to defeat violence. Had it been the fever or the cure that curdled his senses most? Or could this be the impact of fortune’s blows on a mind not accustomed to losing?

  It was the shortest conclave in Church history. The next day the doors of the Sistine Chapel had barely been locked before they were opened again and Giuliano della Rovere walked out as Pope Julius II. Since Castel Sant’Angelo was now his official property, his first action was to offer the duke visitors’ rooms in the Vatican. With the Orsini still on the streets, where else could he go? But was he a guest or a prisoner?

  As order returned to the city, Niccolò had spent his days jostling with Venetian envoys in the Vatican waiting rooms, both cities falling over themselves to convince the new pontiff of their undying loyalty.

  That first meeting had made his spine tingle. Tall and string thin, with snow white hair and beard, the della Rovere Pope sat stooped on his throne, head to one side like a brooding eagle, eyes cold as flint. The gossip was that he was prone to fits of rage, exploding out of nowhere like spirits thrown onto a fire. You would not want to be in the room with him then. There was not a hint of compassion in this man. No one in his right mind would expect him to keep a promise that went against his own interests.

  When he was not in waiting rooms, he was out gleaning information or composing epic dispatches home. The councils of Florence needed to know anything and everything, and it was his job to make sense of a whole new landscape of power. So when a few weeks later Cesare Borgia had issued an invitation for him to visit, the fact that he was having to do the asking was its own sign of weakness.

  On his way in, Niccolò had passed a man in priest’s dress coming out, too wrapped up in his own thoughts to greet him. He had thought then that it must be the duke’s doctor, for his had never been a household to set any score by God.

  Inside, Borgia greeted him with a body hug—a crush of bones as much as flesh—and a torrent of talk: how Florence had always been his greatest friend. Unless of course she was again his enemy. That this Pope was a slimy one, for there was no sign of confirmation of his office, and with each passing day the wolves howled at the gates of yet another of his towns.

  “I should be out leading an army, but how can I leave Rome now? What news do you hear on the matter? Nothing? Are you sure? Well, never mind. I have another, better plan now, which is why I have brought you here.”

  At the back of the room Michelotto stood sentry as always. A few times Niccolò had tried to catch his eye, but his gaze was fixed on the floor. He must know. How could he not?

  Another plan. Niccolò could barely believe his ears.

  In return for safe passage for him and his men into Tuscany, the duke would become Florence’s protector, which she needed now since Venice was a hyena and the King of France’s days were numbered, for this new Pope held a grudge against everyone. Italy would come to rue his election and only he, Cesare, could save the day. How quickly could Niccolò guarantee his safe passage, for there was no time to lose.

  Thinking back on it ten years later, Niccolò can still remember the mix of pity and excitement he had felt as he wrote that night’s dispatch, describing an inconstant, irresolute man whose fortunes were moving from bad to worse; this once consummate strategist who would never tell a soul what he might be thinking was now shouting to everyone about things he could not possibly achieve.

  What had Biagio once said to him? Your beloved Valentine. Had Niccolò misjudged his character totally, or was this what happened when a man was overwhelmed by fortune?

  Niccolò had known Florence would refuse safe passage, but he had told the councils plainly that he thought the duke would send his men anyway and so they should be on the lookout. Two weeks later, a Florentine force had captured Valentine’s soldiers, arms and baggage, along with the prize catch of Michelotto himself.

  Inch by inch Cesare Borgia was slipping into his grave.

  Beautifully put, Biagio had told him later over a stoop of wine, though the image had given him no pleasure.

  —

  In his study, Niccolò leans back in his chair. As so often happens, his thoughts have wandered. His fingers are cramped from his grip on the quill, and his damaged right shoulder is growling in memory of the strappado, as it does more often now the weather has turned cold. History; everyone builds up their own. And this, until now, has been his.

  The fire in the grate is almost out. If it were summer he might go now and sit on the stone terrace that looks north toward Florence and wait for the dawn, for it can be a lovely sight, the color returning to the land, a mixture of God’s wonder and Lucretius’s pulsating, all-encompassing nature. During the first months of his exile, such beauty had acted as balm on his soul. With autumn and the denuding of the trees, he had discovered that in a certain spot, over to the right, he can just make out the top of Brunelleschi’s great dome rising from the valley floor six or seven miles away: a small distance, but a long journey for him now. He chooses not to look for it anymore, for it reminds him of everything that he has lost.

  There will be no place in his little book for the end of the duke’s story, for it is too protracted and bitter: how Pope Julius had reeled him in on a long line—promising, cajoling, threatening and finally imprisoning him. Any dream of a Borgia state in the Romagna was long dead, and the Pope was one of many waiting to pick up the pieces, but there had been a few cities that had stayed loyal in memory of fair government, refusing to open their gates to anyone without the agreed password.

  In the end, Cesare Borgia had given Julius the magic words in return for his freedom. Except that there was nowhere in Italy that would have him, and when at last he fled to Naples on the promise of safe haven from the Spanish commander, he was betrayed by an arrangement between the Pope and the Spanish monarchy. He had been shipped to Valencia, arriving as a prisoner at the same port from where his father had so optimistically departed for Italy half a century before. A family come full circle.

  He died making an escape attempt from the last of his many jai
ls. Those who witnessed it spoke of a suicide rather than a battle, a man charging straight out into a line of soldiers, cut down before he killed even one of them. Niccolò had been in the field inspecting local troops when the news had come. A Florentine militia! His greatest ambition had become a reality, though even then he could see how a part-time army brought with it its own problems. At first, he had felt very little—in his heart Cesare had been dead for a long time—but in the coming days memories flooded back: the magnificence of the taking of Urbino, the sly triumph of Sinigaglia, the compulsive, almost violent charm of a man with no illusions about greed and fickleness, who thought he could never lose. If Cesare was here now, his mind clear again, what conversations they might have about the strategy of soldiering.

  No, whatever the indignity of his final years, the duke’s passing had been something to be mourned. Niccolò would have been the only one to do so, except of course for his sister, Lucrezia, who according to the envoys from Ferrara, took the news very badly indeed.

  Lucrezia Borgia-d’Este. Though their paths had never crossed, Niccolò has followed her fortunes with interest. After the death of Duke Ercole, she and her husband had forged a strong partnership as the winds of war brought first the Venetians, and then the forces of the choleric Pope himself, down upon Ferrara. She gave the Este family the heirs they needed, and when Duke Alfonso was away fighting for their state’s survival, she ran the government in his stead, playing host to diplomats, overseeing civil justice and bravely keeping up the appearance of a humanist court, even when the sound of the cannons could be heard in the distance. There was gossip, of course: that she had once had a passionate affair with her own brother-in-law, the ruler of Mantua. If that were true, their mutual positions of power had kept them safe, though it would no doubt have enraged his wife, the Marchesa Isabella, for it was common knowledge the two women had never got on.

  Borgia blood. It seems it runs strongly in her veins too, and though her sons and daughters would be d’Estes, they will carry a line of Borgia blood with them into history. It is all that is left of a family that was once poised to take half of Italy.

  Niccolò closes his notebook and cleans his pen. When he finishes this work of his—and it will not be long now—there will be nothing to write but letters. Better to eke it out a little longer. He already knows how it will end. A final chapter with some judicious hyperbole and deference is called for: a call to arms for a new prince to free Italy from her invaders and take the country into a new golden age. Who better suited for the job than the new Medici ruler of Florence, a man from a family that has already tasted greatness? If Biagio were here, he would no doubt mock him for such toadying, but it is only a necessary veneer of flattery, another example of how man’s nature, for good and ill, lies at the wellspring of politics.

  And because he has leaned so heavily on the lessons of history, Niccolò will leave the last words to the past: the voice of the fourteenth-century Tuscan poet Petrarch looking back to the glory days of Imperial Rome:

  Prowess shall take up arms

  Against brutality, and the battle will be swift;

  For ancient Roman bravery

  Is not yet dead in Italian hearts.

  The sentiment is more optimistic than he feels, but sometimes it is necessary for a man to dissemble in pursuit of the best end. He still has a few friends on the edges of power. If they can help get his work noticed, then surely it might act as his calling card back into government. For what would his life be like without it?

  Historical Note

  The last five novels I have written have been the fruit of a double passion: for history and for storytelling. I first encountered the power of the past by reading historical fiction as a teenager. It lit a fire in me that took me away from fiction and into serious historical study, and by the time I left university I was convinced that no novel (or certainly not one that I could write) could do justice to the complexities, nuance and depth of the process of history.

  When I returned to challenge my conviction sixteen years ago, it was the Italian renaissance and its profound impact on Western culture, politics, religion and art that propelled me. Being a child of my age, I was also fascinated to find out what, under a roll call of famous men, might have been the experiences and achievements of women. The stories that my research threw up, much of it the work of recent scholars, gave me vibrant material for a trilogy of novels, whose plots were fiction, but whose characters, along with the texture, experiences and details of their lives, were rooted in historical fact.

  In 2010, I turned my attention to the Borgias. Here was the biggest challenge of all. In the 1490s, this Spanish family, led by Pope Alexander VI, set out to found a dynasty and a new power block in a fragmented Italy. Their methods were often corrupt and brutal, much like the society they lived in. As foreigners they were insulted and reviled, and when their ambitions failed, the historians who followed them continued the process of deceit. I wanted to set the record straight, most especially with regard to the character of Lucrezia, who, over the centuries through novels, operas, films and multiple television series, has become a symbol of a villainous vamp and guilty of incest, and lust, intrigue, murder and poison.

  In the Name of the Family, like Blood and Beauty before it, sets out to tell the truth—or at least as much of it as we know—about this colorful family; from the political manipulations of the Pope to his love of sardines and the Virgin Mary; from the volatile brilliance of Cesare Borgia to his battle with the pox and his near demise in a barrel of icy water; from Lucrezia’s arguments with her father-in-law over money to the words I am dead, which she is reported to have said during her illness. Firsthand sources are woven everywhere into the story, gleaned from ambassadors’ reports, the diaries of Johannes Burchard, the surviving correspondence between Pietro Bembo and Lucrezia, the many letters of Isabella d’Este, and the penetrating dispatches and writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose experiences as a diplomat during these years helped inform his views on human nature and his works on political philosophy. (This extraordinary man never did get his job back. But his misfortune was history’s gain since it gave him the time and the impetus to continue writing, not only about history and politics, but also two comic, bawdy and illuminating plays.)

  In all these cases I am beholden to the various translators and scholars whose work I used, all noted in the bibliography, but especially Deanna Shemek, professor of literature at the University of California, who allowed me to quote from a new translation of a selection of Isabella’s letters before the volume is published.

  These then were my sources. There are, however, a few places where the demands of storytelling won out over what we know from history. Not every letter quoted in this novel is verbatim (not every piece of correspondence survived), though the events or feelings that they describe are rooted in fact. At a more serious level, I have taken liberties with the following:

  We have no direct proof that Lucrezia Borgia suffered from syphilis (the correspondence between the convent Corpus Domini and Gaspare Torella is entirely my fiction), but there is clear documentation that Alfonso contracted the disease in 1496–1497. His marriage to Lucrezia took place when he would still have been infectious, and her stillbirths, illnesses and early death at the age of thirty-nine during childbirth all suggest that she too had fallen victim to it. Whether she had any suspicion of this we will never know. The disease was young and mutating, doctors were reeling from its impact, and, from the evidence we have, they were much more concerned about its effect on men than women.

  After Pope Alexander VI died in August 1503, there was a brief interregnum pope (ailing and old, Pope Pius III lasted only twenty-two days), while the power vacuum in Rome sorted itself out. It seemed just too confusing to include all the machinations surrounding that conclave, so I have left it out. I have also changed the timing of the birth of Niccolò’s son, described in the letter from his wife. This is the only direct example we have of Marietta Machiavelli
’s voice, and it is so immediately engaging that one can feel her character shining out from it.

  Finally, while Machiavelli’s dispatches and letters are compelling reading, I have taken the liberty of giving him one observation: “The conspirators have taken a dose of slow acting poison.” That actually belonged to the Venetian ambassador to the Vatican, Antonio Guistinian. It seemed just too good to miss.

  All these “mistakes” are deliberate. There will be others, I am sure, that are not, for which I apologize in advance.

  I leave you with one last historical fact. Though the Borgia project effectively ended with Alexander’s death, the family does deliver one final famous figure—the pope’s Spanish great-grandson, St. Francis Borgia, who became head of the Jesuit order and was canonized soon after his death. A Borgia saint. Perhaps the reason I remain intoxicated by history is that it so often trumps anything a novelist’s imagination could come up with.

  For Professor Roy Porter, 1946–2002

  Because the way he thought, taught and wrote history made it as exciting as any novel.

  Acknowledgments

  Books take years to write and help comes in many different forms.

  I owe a debt to Vicky Avery, curator of Renaissance Bronzes at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, who helped me with sixteenth-century foundries, the properties of bronze and the forging of cannons (as well as letting me into the museum storeroom to get my hands on a few stilettos and swords).

  As already mentioned, a special thanks goes to Deanna Shemek for the translations of Isabella d’Este’s letters. To musicologist professor Lauri Stras for her expertise on the court of Ercole d’Este, and alerting me to the arrival of Josquin des Pres just in time for him to make his way into the text. To the professor and historian Lauro Martines for conversations on the nature of the Florentine state, and to professor Kate Lowe, who I can confidently say knows more about Bishop/Cardinal Francesco Soderini than anyone else in the world.