The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  This system didn’t merely work, it worked brilliantly. The harvesting of children gave the Turks a force of so-called janissaries that was one of the wonders of the age: not only the first large-scale standing army to be seen in Europe since classical times, but the first recognizably modern army. The janissaries were salaried, wore uniforms, lived in barracks, marched in time to music, and were trained to a level of discipline and efficiency that had no equal elsewhere. They also became great innovators, pioneers, for example, in the use of muskets and artillery. (The walls of Constantinople, during the siege that ended in the city’s fall, were reduced to rubble by huge stone balls fired from the Turks’ twenty-six-foot cannons, the doomsday weapons of their time.) What was perhaps most improbable, janissaries were as a rule almost fanatically faithful to their masters. And why not? The most talented and ambitious of them could achieve high rank at an early age and all the good things that success brought with it.

  The Turks trafficked in women as well—they would continue to do so into the twentieth century—but the world of their female slaves was vastly more limited than that of the janissaries. The capture of young women was one of the primary objectives of the sultan’s troops when they went plundering, and their raids on foreign territory yielded bountiful supplies of salable flesh. The most attractive girls naturally came into the possession of senior officers, who in turn would pass some of them further up the chain of command until a tiny minority were selected for the sultan’s harem. Thus was perpetuated perhaps the most peculiar characteristic of the Ottoman dynasty: the fact that it was not a family at all in any ordinary sense, but a line of men who had, instead of queens, platoons of women whom they owned and who lived as their pampered prisoners.

  Infidelity was made impossible for these women by another famous feature of the sultan’s Topkapi palace: a harem guard force made up of black African slaves who, because their sexual organs had been removed, could not cuckold the monarch. Because Islamic law forbade castration, the Turks purchased these eunuchs as children from such places as Ethiopia, Abyssinia, and Sudan, where slave traders were happy to perform the necessary alterations. The palace also employed white eunuchs drawn from European sources, but these were used in administrative functions rather than as harem guards. Eunuchs, like janissaries, sometimes became the most powerful officials in the empire.

  The claustrophobic world of the harem, and the inhabitants’ competition for the attention of the sultan, made it a hotbed of vicious intrigue. The first harem girl to present the sultan with a son, whether before or after he inherited the throne, became by doing so the mother of the imperial heir. This gave her superiority over her harem-mates no matter how lofty their origins—and not a few were daughters of conquered rulers—or how many sons they ultimately produced. The true ruler of the harem, however, was always the sultan’s mother. She was empowered, among other things, to order the execution of her son’s women if she deemed this advisable. She could also, if her son was weak or more interested in self-indulgence than in the duties of his office, become de facto ruler of the empire. Obviously this was a recipe for trouble, producing in every generation a huge supply of surplus younger sons whose frustrated and jealous mothers encouraged their resentments. The results, predictably dire, included rebellion and warfare among the sons of deceased sultans.

  Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople and disturber of the peace of Calixtus III, was the son of a sultan who had had to defeat and kill an uncle and a younger brother in order to make himself secure on the throne. Mehmed’s grandfather too had had to fight his own brothers to the death in order to become sultan, his great-grandfather had ordered the strangulation of a younger brother to nip trouble in the bud, and so on back through the generations. This grim history prompted Mehmed to institute a practice that would persist for centuries: whenever a new sultan took the throne, his younger brothers and half-brothers were put to death. As time passed this answer to the succession problem would be refined in grisly ways. It would become customary for the pregnant members of a dead sultan’s harem to be bundled together in sacks and dropped into the sea. The survivors, whether young or old, spent the rest of their lives in celibate confinement.

  Mehmed was often a good deal less savage in dealing with his Christian subjects than with his own relatives. As continued conquests caused the Turkish portion of the empire’s population to be numerically overwhelmed by Christians, he found it advantageous to extend a degree of toleration that was unusual for the time but not without cost to the beneficiaries. He heavily taxed the Christians—almost all of them members of the Orthodox rather than the Roman Church—in return for allowing them to retain their clergy. And of course they were expected to submit without question to the Islamic political regime.

  The bitter division that separated the Roman and Orthodox churches abetted the Ottomans in expanding their frontiers. It had begun with the unspeakable savagery with which the Fourth Crusade, organized for the purpose of retaking Jerusalem, sacked Constantinople instead and then made it the seat of a short-lived Latin empire. Then came the failure of the West to come to the assistance of the Byzantines when they stood on the brink of destruction, and the willingness of some Western powers to prey on Constantinople themselves. Against this background, and however much it may have baffled and infuriated Calixtus III and others in Rome, it is not really surprising that Orthodox Christians such as the Bulgarians and the Serbs sometimes sided with the Ottoman sultan rather than with the Christian West.

  But it is also not surprising, considering the seriousness of the threat, that stopping the advance of the Ottoman Empire into Europe became the defining purpose of Calixtus’s papacy, practically his reason for existing. The first need was for ships—galleys—with which to engage the seagoing forces of the sultan. Naval engineering in the mid-fifteenth century was remarkably unchanged from what it had been two thousand years before. Across all the centuries since the time of Pericles the state-of-the-art warship had remained the trireme, a long, narrow vessel of shallow draft propelled by three banks of oars on each side, as many as 150 oars in all, each powered by a single crewman. In short bursts these galleys could skim forward at great speed, and in all navies the basic tactic was to grapple with enemy vessels, board them, and butcher their crews. The first sailing ships capable of tacking into the wind were still decades in the future, and even after they appeared, galleys would remain dominant in the Mediterranean for another century.

  Before he had been in office a month Calixtus was hiring galleys and crews wherever they could be found, asking the Italian powers and the crowned heads of the north to contribute their fleets to the cause, and turning Rome’s Ripa Grande embankment into an enormous bustling shipyard. Craftsmen brought to Rome for the purpose were laying down the keels of all the new galleys for which space could be found. The papal treasury or camera, restored to solvency by Nicholas V, was again emptied to make this possible. Calixtus’s lifestyle, always simple, was now imposed on the Vatican’s entire establishment and staff. Spending for nonmilitary purposes was slashed almost in half, largely by slowing or halting Martin V’s construction projects and reducing the number of scholars and artists employed at the Vatican. The displaced men complained that this was what came of electing a foreign pope, a barbarian of low tastes and rude values, but Calixtus was undeterred. The books in the Vatican library, though not sold off, were stripped of their gold and silver bindings and jeweled adornments. Possessions ranging from country estates to Nicholas’s silver service went on the auction block. Plain earthenware was all that he required, the pope declared. He set May 1, 1456, just under a year off, as the day on which the new fleet would embark, and in the course of that year he spent 150,000 ducats on the preparations.

  All the resources of the Vatican were not going to suffice, however. Calixtus dictated appeals to the rich and powerful in every corner of Europe; the pontifical archives contain thirty volumes of these messages, which relays of legates carried to their addre
ssees. Churches everywhere were instructed to ring their bells daily to remind the faithful to pray for the success of the crusade. (This would become the Angelus, the universal and still-practiced ringing of church bells every day at noon.) Tithes were imposed on ecclesiastical revenues, collections were taken up among the laity, and rulers were urged to put aside their disputes and focus on saving Christendom from being overrun. Preachers offered indulgences—release from punishment in the hereafter—to all who contributed the prescribed amounts of support.

  The response was rarely what Calixtus hoped. Throughout Europe the very idea of crusades had grown tiresome. The glory of the first crusade more than 350 years earlier, with its expulsion of the Muslims from Jerusalem and the establishment of a Christian kingdom there, had been followed by eight subsequent expeditions that cumulatively produced little except defeat, disgrace, and tragic loss. Two centuries of sacrifice ended not only with the surrender of everything that had been gained in the beginning but with such horrors as the Children’s Crusade (during which thousands of young volunteers disappeared into slavery in the East) and the sacking of Christian Constantinople by invaders from the West.

  The crusading ideal had been further degraded by popes who abused it to make war on political enemies close to home. By 1455 such things were a fading memory, but not a happy one. For most Catholic Christians, who had never seen a Turk, the Ottoman conquests in the eastern Mediterranean were remote to the point of seeming not quite real. Outright hostility to the pope’s appeals was rare except in Germany, where resentment lingered about the great sums sent to Rome in the past to pay for crusades that never happened. Not many of the pope’s envoys encountered the kind of anger that erupted when one of their number tried to sell Calixtus’s crusade to a congregation gathered in Cologne Cathedral—he was sent running for his life—but not many were received with enthusiasm either. Stony indifference was the usual reaction.

  Nor did Calixtus get what he wanted from the rulers. In England, where King Henry VI had just emerged from one of his bouts of catatonic insanity, the Wars of the Roses were just heating up, and not even many churchmen cared about what was happening in Italy and beyond. Charles VII of France promised thirty warships but then decided to keep them at home for use against the English. The fearsome soldier Francesco Sforza, having made himself master of Milan only a year before, declined even to pretend to be interested in putting either his own skills or the resources of his duchy at the pope’s disposal. Though Venice above all had reason to fear the expanding reach of the Turks, as usual it was pursuing its own priorities in its own arcane ways and was unable to view the other Western powers as potential allies rather than as rivals.

  But the odium that today attaches to the word crusade notwithstanding, the danger was clear and present, the need for action urgent. From Constantinople the Turks were pushing deeper into the Balkan peninsula, bearing down on Greece, and impinging upon the sea routes that had long brought wealth to Italy. It is testimony to Calixtus’s understanding of the magnitude of the crisis, and the energy with which he responded despite his feeble health, that he had a first squadron of galleys ready for deployment by September 1455, barely five months after his election. He ordered this squadron to station itself south of Sicily, where its assignment was to intercept any Turkish moves into the western Mediterranean and against Rome while the main fleet was still under construction there. But the entire exercise was turned into a disaster and a humiliation by the squadron’s commander, Pietro Urrea, bishop of Tarragon. Calixtus found himself deluged with complaints that Urrea was operating as nothing better than a pirate, using the vessels entrusted to him to plunder Christian shipping. If Urrea had been selected for command because like Calixtus he was a Spaniard, the pope had made a mistake that would have painful ramifications.

  Hope was to be found in one place only—in Naples, whose king, Calixtus’s onetime master Alfonso of Aragon, appeared to be the one happy exception to the indifference and cynicism that pervaded all of Europe. Alfonso not only promised a fleet of galleys but actually assembled one. The pope’s agents reported that this fleet lay at anchor in the Bay of Naples, ready to join the new Roman fleet as soon as it deployed. A hard blow against the Turks seemed possible after all.

  Background

  IL REGNO—THE KINGDOM

  THE FIRST THING TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT NAPLES AND ITS place in the story of the Borgias is that it was not then what it is today. Its name did not stand for a city only—ancient and vibrant and fascinating, but just a city all the same—but for a kingdom covering almost the whole southern half of the Italian peninsula. Until France proved otherwise when a second Borgia pope sat on the throne of St. Peter, Naples was believed to rank among the leading powers not only of Italy but of all Europe.

  Its stature is evident in the willingness of no less a figure than Alfonso V, already the ruler of Aragon and a number of the greatest Mediterranean islands including Sicily, to devote much of his life to making himself Alfonso I of Naples as well.

  Alfonso was motivated in part by the thought—he was not the first to have it—that possession of Naples would position him for further and greater gains, possibly even mastery of all Italy and the extension of his empire eastward toward Asia. Hence the price he was willing to pay to continue his campaign for Naples, and the risks he was willing to take.

  Naples had always been such a great prize that there was nothing remotely unique about the three decades of struggle that culminated in Alfonso’s victory. To the contrary, his long war was only the most recent in an almost uninterrupted series of conflicts that had been soaking southern Italy in blood since the fall of the Roman Empire. Nor could there be anything astonishing, for anyone who knew the Naples story, in the way that Alfonso’s success, rather than leaving him satisfied, inflamed his hunger for more. He was the third Neapolitan king in two centuries not only to want all of Italy but to appear to have a real chance of getting it. The threat that he posed to his neighbors to the north, to Rome and Florence and even faraway Venice and Milan, was a natural function of the power of his new kingdom—or of its perceived power, at any rate. When combined not only with the great island of Sicily but with Alfonso’s other possessions in the Mediterranean, and with his Spanish domains as well, the crown of Naples made him a terrifying force.

  It also, not incidentally, gave him one of the world’s oldest and greatest capital cities, the largest in all Europe in the fifteenth century with a population that can only be estimated but was well in excess of a hundred thousand. Naples was so old that its origins were Greek rather than Italian—it began as Neapolis or New City, one of the main strongpoints of the adventurers who colonized southern Italy before the rise of Rome and called it Greater Greece. Over the ensuing millennia Naples had seen not only rulers and dynasties but whole civilizations rise and fade away. It saw no reason to think itself inferior to Italy’s other leading states, Rome included. Its people are not likely to have been greatly impressed with the arrival of the Spaniard Alfonso V, or to have felt particularly honored by his decision to make Naples, rather than Sicily or Corsica or Sardinia or Aragon itself, the capital of his empire. The choice would have seemed merely natural. Neither is it likely that the Neapolitans gave Alfonso much chance of having any more success, or making a more lasting impact, than the kings who had ruled them before him. They had watched them all come, and watched them all go.

  In the years following the collapse of the Roman Empire, Naples had fallen into the hands of that branch of the invading northern barbarians known as the Ostrogoths. In the sixth century it became an outpost of Constantinople, in the eighth a duchy subject to the popes in Rome, and in the ninth an independent entity much troubled both by outside enemies and internal contests for power.

  In the eleventh century, at nearly the same time the nobles of Normandy were invading England under William the Conqueror, other Norman warriors were moving to southern Italy to take up employment as soldiers for hire. By the twelfth, having
awakened to the fact that they were more powerful than their employers, these Normans took control of both Sicily and Naples and joined them in a single kingdom. Their regime became the most impressive in all of western Europe, north or south, with a court unrivaled in culture and magnificence. It was under the Normans, as the historian Benedetto Croce observed, that southern Italy gave rise to “the state as a work of art.”

  The Norman kings gave way in the mid-twelfth century to the Hohenstaufen dynasty from Swabia in Germany. Generation after generation, this remarkable family produced such epic figures as Frederick Barbarossa and his grandson Frederick II, called in his own time Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World. These men spent their lives in Sicily and Naples, neglecting their home base in the north, and their rising power brought them into conflict with the popes in Rome. Fear of Frederick II caused Pope Urban IV to invite Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX of France, to come to Italy and take charge of his war with the Hohenstaufen. After a long struggle during which he was excommunicated four times, Frederick was finally bested in battle and politically destroyed. In 1266, after Charles of Anjou finished off the Hohenstaufen by defeating and killing Frederick’s illegitimate son Manfred, Pope Innocent IV crowned him Charles I of Naples.

  France and the other future great kingdoms of the north being still backward, fragmented, and weak, Charles’s coronation vaulted him into the first rank of European monarchs. He was able to dictate the outcome of papal elections, and he aspired to more than that. He had acquired Provence through marriage, made himself king of Albania by conquest, and was planning to reconstitute the onetime Latin empire in the eastern Mediterranean when, in 1282, the bloody phenomenon known as the Sicilian Vespers brought his ambitions to an end. This was a plot to expel the Angevins from Sicily, and it turned into a massacre of the island’s French population. By the time Charles died three years later, Sicily had become the property of Aragon in Spain, and he, though still king of Naples, was a spent force.