by G. J. Meyer
Without question Alfonso had it within his means to help Skanderbeg substantially, and without question he was greatly in Skanderbeg’s debt. There being no particular need to care about the fate of Albania at the moment, however, it was not in the king’s nature to be distracted from his own immediate priorities, especially the status of his son Ferrante in the aftermath of Calixtus’s refusal to issue a bull (a document bearing the papal seal and therefore official) declaring the young man to be legitimate. It was by now clear that so long as Calixtus remained alive, Ferrante’s path to the crown would be anything but assured.
Lurking in the background through all this was the question of whether Ferrante was actually Alfonso’s son. Doubts about his paternity had stalked Ferrante all his life. From his infancy people had whispered that his real father was a half-Moorish functionary at the Aragonese court, and alternatively that Ferrante’s supposed mother had pretended to give birth to him in order to spare the wife of one of the king’s brothers the humiliation of being exposed as an adulteress. Whatever the truth—and the rumors may have been rooted in nothing more substantial than a belief the great Alfonso couldn’t possibly have fathered such an unappealing human being—by the late 1450s Calixtus was in as good a position as anyone still living to know it. At the time of Ferrante’s birth he had been Alfonso’s secretary, and at the center of Aragonese court life, for some five years.
There being nothing in Calixtus’s life story to cast doubt on his integrity or his respect for the prerogatives of royalty, his unbending opposition to Ferrante remains an enticing mystery. Niccolò Machiavelli, who was still eleven years from being born when Alfonso died and appears to have had little evidence to draw on, would later allege that the pope was scheming to make one of his own nephews the king of Naples. This is implausible for many reasons, not least the existence of other, far more formidable claimants. Perhaps by this point Calixtus’s hatred for Alfonso had grown so powerful as to overwhelm his usual equanimity. Possibly he was repelled by the prospect of a bastard becoming anointed king of the great kingdom of Naples; having been born and raised in a culture far more feudal than Italy’s, he is likely to have taken a sternly disapproving view of illegitimate birth. Additionally, he had seen enough of the world to understand the threat to stability that sons born out of wedlock could pose when they laid claim to thrones, and the wisdom of the ancient precept that no bastard should ever become king. And it is in no way impossible that he believed—and had reason to believe—that Ferrante was not even Alfonso’s bastard.
Finally and most interestingly, there is the fact that the pope knew Ferrante intimately: had overseen his education, functioned as a kind of guardian, and personally escorted him to Italy when Alfonso summoned him there. Ferrante’s own life story, as we shall see, makes it possible to suspect that Calixtus, knowing what kind of man he was, foresaw what kind of ruler he would be and found the prospect horrifying.
Background
AMAZING ITALY
THE ITALY FOR WHICH ALONSO DE BORJA LEFT SPAIN IN THE 1440s, and to which many of his relatives later began migrating in hopes of benefiting from his exalted position, was a place that lightning had struck twice. A full thousand years after the collapse of the Roman Empire, it was once again the wonder of the world: the richest region in all of Europe because by a wide margin the most economically advanced. Its cities were incomparably the biggest, most beautiful, and most vibrant, and in fields as diverse as education and architecture, banking and art, it was leading the way to modernity.
In one area only was Italy conspicuously backward. Politically it was so fragmented, in such disarray, that strictly speaking there was no such thing as “Italy.” From the Alps southward the peninsula was a crazy quilt of large and small city-states, some of which were more or less autonomous while others were subject to domineering neighbors. They differed vastly in character and had long since shown themselves to be incapable of sustained cooperation. To the extent that their people saw themselves as members of a single Italian nation, they did so by virtue of more or less sharing a common language (“more or less” because that language was splintered into a babel of dialects) and a culture unlike any to be found elsewhere. But their nationhood, such as it was, had never come close to producing unity. That this remained true while France and Spain were beginning to coalesce under increasingly powerful monarchs meant that Italy, for all its achievements, was year by year growing comparatively weaker. It was becoming vulnerable.
How Italy had come to be such a stunning place—and that is literally what it was, newcomers from the north consistently describing themselves as stunned upon experiencing it for the first time—is of course a complicated story. Probably it starts with the fact that much of the Italian peninsula, having been the heart of the empire of the Caesars, continued during what we call the Dark Ages to cling to two things that were disappearing in places more distant from Rome. One was the town as the core around which society was organized. Whereas throughout northern Europe cities of any significance became rare, with the nobility withdrawing into often-remote fortresses from which they could dominate populations of peasants, the most vital parts of Italy remained distinctly town-centered.
Except in the region around Rome and the sprawling kingdom of Naples, both of which developed a feudal order similar to the one prevailing beyond the Alps, the survival of the towns and the evolution of some of them into great cities became an essential element in Italy’s unique character. Class and caste distinctions grew faint and porous as nobles and merchants, artisans and soldiers and clergy, learned to live together on terms approaching equality in their crowded, lively streets. More than in any other place in Europe, the townsfolk of Italy were not oppressed, could not even be looked down on, by the hereditary nobility. To the contrary, some of the greatest cities came to be ruled by their commercial classes. It was not uncommon for nobles to be excluded from public life, and for noble families to be forced to abandon their rural strongholds and move to town.
The other fragment of the classical past that set Italy apart was the Roman law, which was not swept away in favor of rigid, status-focused feudal codes as happened elsewhere. This proved to have a profound impact intellectually, culturally, and socially. While the scholars of a slowly reviving northern Europe were focusing on theology and philosophy, in the early twelfth century their Italian counterparts discovered and undertook the study of digests of imperial law compiled under the Emperor Justinian six hundred years earlier. Italy’s traders found in the old code an ideal framework for their bustling commercial life: practical rules and regulations and guidelines, ways of doing business, that grew ever more relevant as the economy developed. The Italian universities, the first to appear anywhere on earth, attached an importance to the study of the law not to be found in France, Germany, or Spain.
Italy was shaped also, even long after Rome ceased to be the hub of the known world, by an astonishing diversity of outside influences. The Eastern Christian Empire, from its capital at Constantinople, early put its cosmopolitan stamp on Sicily and the southern part of the peninsula as well as on its main outpost on the northern Adriatic coast, the port of Ravenna. Sicily was an Arab possession until late in the eleventh century, the Normans then came from northern France to make themselves kings of Naples as well as Sicily, both places fell next into the hands of the Spanish, and from the Dark to the High Middle Ages a succession of German chieftains and kings descended regularly upon Italy and laid claim to various parts of it. Meanwhile the bishops of Rome were evolving into popes, declaring themselves the spiritual leaders of all Christendom, and becoming the overlords of much of central Italy.
The peninsula became an arena in which the popes and Germany’s so-called Holy Roman emperors fought each other for dominance. Both sides, in seeking the support of the cities, granted them liberties and favors that ultimately, if inadvertently, helped them to become autonomous. Those cities, in turn, were developing in strikingly different ways, sometimes a
dopting republican forms of government that at a distance could almost be mistaken for democracy. Many fell under the dominion of warlords, and even the republics came to be run by elites that rarely constituted more than a fraction of their populations.
By the time Alonso Borgia became Calixtus III, the peninsula had long been dominated by five “great” (by Italy’s modest standards) powers:
Venice, a republic dominated by an oligarchy of merchant families that had grown immensely rich and risen to a position of international importance by trading throughout the eastern Mediterranean, building there a great network of colonies and commercial alliances.
Florence, also a republic and ruled by families that had made their fortunes in banking, manufacturing, and trade, the jewel in Italy’s golden crown by virtue of the astonishing artistic and intellectual flowering that, before the end of the fifteenth century, would make it one of the most dazzling cultural phenomena in all of human history.
Rome, a theocracy dominated by the pope, gradually recovering some of its long-lost strength but still an administrative center only, without a commercial middle class capable of challenging the baronial clans.
Milan, the giant of the north, an industrial powerhouse and master of the vast fertile plain of Lombardy, politically a tyranny, long in the grip first of its Visconti and then of its Sforza dukes.
And of course Naples, Il Regno, a kingdom encompassing the whole southern half of the mainland, the most feudal state in Italy and therefore also the most backward, fatally weakened by an endless struggle between its great capital city and rural barons unwilling to be ruled by anyone.
The greatest of Italy’s cities—Naples, Venice, and Milan—all had populations of well over a hundred thousand when London was still the only city in England with as many as twenty thousand residents. And all of them controlled great expanses of countryside, staking out broad spheres of influence by conquest, intimidation, and bribery. All of them but Naples, which stagnated under the oppressive rule of a series of more or less vicious and decadent monarchs, possessed a vitality to be found almost nowhere else. They took for granted things that remained unknown or unwelcome elsewhere: rapid change, steady growth, and wide-open social mobility—even, in some places, educational opportunities for women comparable to those available to men.
The absence of a functioning feudal system, and of feudalism’s arrangement of the population into commoners who owed loyalty to nobles who in turn owed loyalty to kings, had one unfortunate consequence. Some of the greatest of the city-states, along with innumerable smaller communities including tiny hilltop villages, came to be dominated by local strongmen who could make no claim to political legitimacy—to having any real right to the power they wielded. In the fourteenth century, when the papacy was absent from Rome and utterly incapable of stopping thugs from seizing pieces of the Papal States and setting themselves up as tyrants, authority based on force alone became virtually the norm. Thus the masters of one city-state after another were in a vastly less justifiable position than, say, an English baron whose title and landholdings had been formally conferred upon him in a Church-sanctioned ceremony by an anointed king. Even when the usurpers were able to win recognition as papal vicars, governing their domains in the pope’s name, such titles were little more than legal fictions. They signified almost nothing—certainly not a willingness to be loyal to the pope. To the extent that vicariate status gave the warlords a shred of the legitimacy they craved, it was a shred too scanty to remove their insecurity or make them more responsible in the use of their power or make the so-called Papal States more peaceful.
Misrule and instability thus formed the dark underside of the Italian Renaissance, with almost every regime recurrently under threat from internal as well as external enemies. It was far from uncommon, and at times was almost commonplace, for the lords of Italy’s cities to be bloodily overthrown—often by their own kinsmen, with brother killing brother either to gain or to retain power. Men who had become rulers through violence could find little grounds for complaint, and often nowhere to appeal, when their turn came to be violently overthrown. Might made right: this became a fact of life and was the one utterly inglorious element in Renaissance Italy’s otherwise magnificent heritage. Betrayal and murder became endemic even at the most exalted levels of society, even within the greatest families. This was the world in which the Borjas of Valencia had to learn to make their way.
4
Family Matters
During the years when an increasingly feeble Calixtus III was bringing unexpected vigor to meeting the Turkish threat, managing a Church that was the largest and by far the most complex institution in Europe, and struggling to cope with the never-ending schemes and squabbles of strongmen far and near, another and more personal dimension of his life was becoming burdensome as well.
This was his relationship with his family, which in addition to being numerous and eager for advancement had become binational as more and more of its members left Spain for Rome to see what advantage could be wrung from having a relative who was first a cardinal and then—miracle of miracles—the supreme pontiff.
We don’t know how many Borgias were in Italy during Calixtus’s reign, only that their demands for favors provoked him to complain. But he complained too of relatives who had not left Spain at all, instead remaining there while appealing for help in achieving a lifestyle appropriate to a family whose name he had made grand. Among the stay-at-homes was his sister Isabella, who as a young woman had married their kinsman Don Jofrè de Borja, son of a wealthier branch of the family with better connections to the aristocracy. This Jofrè had died in 1437, leaving Isabella with a family of at least two sons and four daughters, possibly more. By that time Alonso was bishop of Valencia and living in Italy in the service of Alfonso V. He permitted Isabella to move with her brood into Valencia’s episcopal palace, which put her on a level with the city’s proudest families.
In terms of bloodline, Isabella’s children stood above their mother and her brother the cardinal. Their paternal grandmother, Don Jofrè’s mother, was a child of the de Oms family, which occupied a higher perch in the Valencian nobility than any of the Borjas. It was partly because of his marriage to Sibila de Oms that Jofrè’s father, Rodrigo Gil de Borja, had risen to be chief counselor of Játiva and a member of the court of King Pedro of Aragon. Isabella’s marriage to Jofrè had been a significant step up, and Alonso always took an interest in her children. He saw to it that advantageous marriages were arranged for the daughters and that the sons were provided with the kinds of educations and connections that could get young careers off to a fast start. Alonso had another sister, Catalina, who had made a good marriage to the Valencian baron Juan del Milà, and he was generous with assistance to their numerous progeny as well.
Several of Alonso’s nephews and cousins, Isabella’s son Rodrigo and Catalina’s Luis Juan del Milà among them, were steered toward careers in the Church. This was customary because practical: it was in the ecclesiastical field that an uncle who was first a bishop and then a cardinal could be most helpful. Vatican records show Rodrigo and Luis Juan being singled out, as early as the reign of Eugenius IV, for benefices, offices generating ecclesiastical income, that would have been unimaginable without the intervention of a patron who had access to the pope’s ear and the king of Aragon’s as well. We see Rodrigo, still no more than a schoolboy, becoming the recipient of ecclesiastical revenues first from his hometown of Játiva, then from the cathedral of Barcelona, and finally from the cathedral of Valencia. In 1449, when Rodrigo was about eighteen and his uncle was in his fifth year as a cardinal resident in Rome, Pope Nicholas V issued a bull allowing him—in contravention of the rules, which is why a bull was necessary—to keep his benefices (all of which were in Spain) even if he resided at a university or in Italy. This cleared the way for the youth to leave Spain for study at one of the great universities of Italy without sacrificing the income that permitted him to live in the style of a young lord—a
cardinal’s nephew. Again there was nothing scandalous, even unusual, about any of this. Everything known about Rodrigo makes it reasonable to suppose that he was both an able student—not even his enemies would ever deny his intelligence—and a conscientious one, consistent hard work being one of his defining characteristics throughout his life.
Rodrigo thus spent the next six years in Italy, along with his brother Pedro Luis and their cousin del Milà, but little is known of their lives. Rodrigo and del Milà were almost certainly studying law at the University of Bologna, and in 1453 the latter, who was probably the elder of the two by a few years, was given the bishopric of Segorbe in Spain although still short of the required canonical age of twenty-seven. Two years later, when Alonso became pope, the nephews, in their mid-twenties now, found their lives dramatically transformed. On May 10, 1455, just twenty days after his coronation, Calixtus appointed all three to positions of importance. Rodrigo was given the high office of protonotary apostolic, with duties appropriate to his legal training. Bishop Luis Juan del Milà became papal legate, representative, in the great city of Bologna, a fief of the papacy. Pedro Luis Borgia, the trio’s sole non-churchman, took command of the Castel Sant’Angelo, the massive and ancient circular fortress that stood on the bank of the River Tiber overlooking the Vatican. This was no mere honorary appointment. The Castel, thirteen hundred years old, was an impregnable stronghold and the cornerstone of papal security in Rome. As its governor and commander of its troops, Pedro Luis became a power in the city and a potential adversary of the baronial clans, the Orsini and Colonna and others, whose unruly behavior kept Rome endlessly on the verge of violent disorder.
