The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  Upon receiving these promotions Rodrigo and Luis Juan returned to Bologna, where the latter took up his duties as legate and the former returned to his studies, completing his doctorate in the autumn of 1456. Before that happened, there had come a flurry of further and even more significant appointments. On February 20, in consistory, Calixtus announced his first three appointments to the Sacred College: his two clerical nephews and, as part of his efforts to win support for the campaign against the Turks, a twenty-two-year-old member of the Portuguese royal family who was also a nephew of Alfonso V. It would later be said that several cardinals objected to the elevation of such young men to such high positions, but in fact there is no contemporary evidence of any such reaction—none provided by anyone in a position to know, certainly. The scholarly diplomat Enea Silvio Piccolomini, a respected figure and destined to become pope himself, wrote at the time that “Cardinal Rodrigo is young, it is true, but his conduct and good sense add years to his age.” Every cardinal present signed the bull of appointment. By the time the promotions were made public, Calixtus had also named Pedro Luis Borgia captain-general, commanding officer, of the papal army.

  These actions, though obviously nepotistic, raised no eyebrows. Such things were not only accepted but expected—Nicholas V had been the exception rather than the rule—and the reasons for them were clear. Calixtus, still new in office, was surrounded by the same men who had assented to his election only because their own choices had been blocked, and they expected him to do nothing while waiting quietly for his own death. These were hardened veterans of the Vatican’s political wars, cynical and self-serving, and to a man they were professing to be the pontiff’s best friends while pushing for the advancement of their own agendas and the thwarting of their rivals. At the center of this tangle of hypocrisy and intrigue, isolated and probably lonely, Calixtus faced immense problems and was in urgent need of deputies he could trust. There were such men among the cardinals who elected him—the Greek Bessarion, the Spaniard Carvajal—and he took them into his confidence. But he needed others too, and he was far from being the first pope to look to his own family. Not even the Orsini or the Colonna could complain when he did so.

  Especially not the Orsini or the Colonna. Both families owed much of their wealth and power to the success of their ancestors in capturing and exploiting the papal crown. And they must have understood that not only Calixtus but the Church itself was fortunate that he had capable and responsible young nephews to place in the Sacred College. As for the appointment of Pedro Luis as captain-general, if it is not excused it is certainly explained by the treachery of the previous incumbent, Giovanni Ventimiglia, who at Siena had snatched defeat from the jaws of what should have been an important papal victory by arranging to have himself taken prisoner by a beaten foe. Beyond that, the promotion is most fairly judged on the basis of Pedro Luis’s subsequent performance in office.

  Calixtus’s elevation of his young nephews reflects his determination, once a campaign against the Turks had been set in motion, to attack other problems as well. Foremost among his other problems were the Papal States, those huge expanses of the Italian landscape that the Church had begun accumulating in the time of the Emperor Constantine but by the dawning of the Renaissance were in the hands of an assortment of warlords and petty despots, few of whom were willing to acknowledge, much less yield to, the authority of Rome. The city-states ruled by these despots and warlords spread across a great part of northern and central Italy. At their core was the thousand-year-old duchy of Rome, which extended from the border with Naples northward into Tuscany, but they also included the Romagna and the March of Ancona on the Adriatic coast, the province of Umbria between the March and Tuscany, the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, the former papal capital of Avignon in what is now France, parts of Corsica, and a long list of scattered cities and towns. All this might have been a source of immense wealth and power for the papacy, but it had rarely been anything of the kind. By the ninth century, barely a hundred years after its possession by the popes had been confirmed by Pepin king of the Franks and reconfirmed by his son Charlemagne, virtually the whole inheritance was completely out of control. And things went downhill from there, reaching their nadir in the fourteenth century when the popes were in exile and the warlords were left free to do as they pleased. By the time of Calixtus the lawlessness of the Papal States and the brutality of their rulers were accepted as normal almost everywhere except inside the Vatican. In determining to put things right, to begin the process of restoring order, Calixtus was challenging some of the most murderously dangerous families in Italy. No one could have been surprised that, in selecting lieutenants to whom he could entrust this domestic crusade, he looked to his sisters’ sons.

  The appointment of Luis Juan del Milà as legate to Bologna made sense as an early step. Ancient and rich, more important than any northern city except Milan and Venice, Bologna had for centuries been a papal fief and therefore subject, in theory, to the temporal authority of Rome. In practice, the families that made up its ruling oligarchy had long since grown accustomed to being accountable to no one, and naturally they had no interest in submitting to Rome. As legate, armed with instructions from his uncle to reassert Rome’s authority, the young Cardinal del Milà was undertaking an assignment that would have been a challenge for the most gifted and experienced of Vatican diplomats. Calixtus, aware that he had no time to spare, was teaching his nephew to swim by throwing him into deep water.

  He did much the same with the Borgia brothers, and for them the waters were deeper and more treacherous. Pedro Luis was instructed to muster the pope’s troops and lead them into the hill country immediately north and west of Rome, territory that had been the property of the Church since before the fall of the Roman Empire but that generations of Orsini had learned to think of as theirs alone. There he was to assert his uncle’s lordship and deal with the resistance that such a claim was certain to provoke. He would be making war not only on the Orsini but also, by unmistakable implication, their patron and semi-secret partner, Alfonso of Aragon and Naples. It would have been a daunting assignment for the best general in Italy.

  Cardinal Rodrigo’s turn came on the last day of 1456, when Calixtus signed a bull appointing him vicar general in matters temporal—matters pertaining to civil governance—in the March of Ancona. Roughly a hundred miles north of Rome on the eastern side of the Apennine Mountains that run down the Italian peninsula like a high ragged spine, the March was not as wild and lawless a part of the Papal States as the Romagna, which lay immediately to its north, but it was wild and lawless enough. It too had long been beyond the reach of papal power and ravaged by the endless petty wars of the local strongmen. Early in his career the brilliant mercenary Francesco Sforza had won control of much of it. Later, when Sforza’s ambitions sent him northward to the far greater prize of Milan, he left pieces of the March in the hands of various members of his family. Alfonso V, always happy to trouble any waters in which he saw the possibility of profitable fishing, later and rather brazenly proposed that Calixtus turn the whole province over to him. In his sixties by this point, a monarch of international importance for nearly half a century, Alfonso had developed such a massive ego that he was able to regard this suggestion as reasonable or at least feasible. He had also probably not entirely stopped hoping that his onetime faithful servant Alonso de Borja would prove willing to do his bidding. The pope, however, was insulted and alarmed. If the March were not brought back under Roman control, he concluded, it might soon be lost forever.

  Calixtus was prodded into action not only by Alfonso’s presumption but by reports of what was happening in the March town of Ascola (Ascoli Piceno today). A young nobleman known to history only as Josias had murdered the town’s resident tyrant, one Giovanni Sforza (whose place in the large tangled family of that name is not clear). After trying to take over as tyrant himself and being expelled by the citizenry, this Josias seized the local rocca or fortress—the property, as it
happened, of the papacy—and began using it as a base from which to prey on the neighborhood as head of a gang of bandits. When Josias’s victims appealed for help to their overlord in the Vatican, Calixtus decided that the time had come to intervene. The job of managing the intervention was going to be immensely complex, with prickly political, diplomatic, and military dimensions. In giving it to the untested young Cardinal Rodrigo, the pope was taking yet another huge risk.

  What followed was an early demonstration of Rodrigo’s precocious competence. The failed tyrant Josias was soon a failed bandit chieftain as well, a prisoner on his way to Rome. The people of Ascola found themselves under an administration more rational and benign than anyone then living in the area had ever experienced. As the cardinal extended his control and his reforms into other parts of the March, he became a popular figure, celebrated as a liberator. His uncle, in sending him north, had equipped him with extraordinary powers, not least with respect to bringing the region’s churchmen under control. He had the authority to bestow any benefice upon any recipient of his choice and also—what could be very useful in bringing ecclesiastical practice into alignment with the needs and realities of the hour—to accept the surrender of benefices. During almost a year in the March he threaded his way through a maze of difficulties, and there is no record of his putting a foot wrong.

  His one unsolvable problem was money. It was expected at this time, in Europe generally, that a churchman in a role of secular administration like Rodrigo’s would pay his own expenses. This was a justification for the heaping of multiple benefices upon senior clergy: in many cases it was not only the simplest but almost the only way of providing a ruler’s senior lieutenants with the revenues they needed to be effective. A famous example is Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who for many years ran the government, the foreign policy, and the Church in England under his master Henry VIII and was able to do so on the grandest scale thanks entirely to the enormous revenues generated by his ecclesiastical offices. Those revenues paid not only for Wolsey’s lavish lifestyle but for the sprawling bureaucracies he headed. The income of the crown itself, at the time, could not have sufficed even to provide Wolsey and his fellow ministers with satisfactory salaries. It was the same in France, in Spain, and elsewhere and is one of the reasons (education being another) why bishops, archbishops, and cardinals were so often top government officers. Their benefices made it unnecessary for the monarchs to pay them—at least in any direct way.

  Rodrigo, however, soon found the costs of bringing new management to the March beyond his ability to pay. His uncle, in financial extremis himself, tried to help in the only way he could: by appointing Rodrigo to the vacant bishopric of Girona in the northeastern corner of Spain, thereby opening up an additional stream of income. Even this, however, proved to be insufficient.

  We will see this sort of thing happening again, and it is something to be taken into account when considering the accusations of greed that have always been directed at Rodrigo. While his income did rise in time to stunning levels, it ceases to seem quite so disgraceful when measured against his expanding responsibilities, the expenses that they entailed, and the need for him to pay most of the bills himself. Throughout most of his life his income would not be his, strictly speaking, but that of the sectors of the Vatican machinery it was his duty to operate.

  During the nine or ten months that he spent in the March, his financial situation was dire. He found it necessary, in order to carry out the mission on which his uncle had sent him, to mortgage—borrow against—his entire projected income for the next three years.

  Worrisome as such problems were, however, they sank into insignificance when orders reached the March for Rodrigo to return to Rome, because he was again being promoted.

  Background

  THE MEN IN THE RED HATS

  THE IMPORTANCE OF THE COLLEGE OF CARDINALS IN THE STORY of the Borgias—the fact that if Alonso had not been made a cardinal, he would never have moved to Rome and certainly could never have been elected pope—raises the question of what exactly a cardinal was in those days, and how it was that becoming one mattered so much.

  The short answer is that, as the fifteenth century advanced and the popes reestablished themselves in Rome, the cardinals became a kind of papal royal family—“princes of the church.” They lived lives of extraordinary privilege, with unique access to power and splendid sources of income. All of which added to the allure of membership in the tiny group that elected the pope and from which new popes were invariably chosen. It also helps to explain why the most powerful families in Italy came to regard it as essential always to be represented in the college.

  Like the papacy itself, like the Church generally, the college was a long time evolving. The first cardinals, when they appeared in the fifth century, were not princes in any sense but simply the chief priests of Rome’s parish churches. Their name was derived from the Latin cardo, which means “hinge” and indicated that cardinals were the main point of connection between the bishop of Rome—il papa—and the people. A century later these cardinal-priests were joined by a new group of cardinal-deacons (deacons being clerics but not ordained priests and therefore not empowered to say mass) with their own distinct responsibilities. After another two hundred years cardinal-bishops appeared as well. This newest group, being made up of men of higher rank than the others, was the most prestigious but had no more power or authority.

  In the eleventh century the three groups, each of which had functioned separately under its own elected dean, increased their clout by combining into a single body, the Sacred College. It established its own small bureaucracy, assumed responsibility for the management of papal elections (though not yet for actually doing the electing), and secured for its members all the top positions in the Curia, the papal administrative machinery. In such ways it gave itself a foundation from which it would become capable of challenging the authority of the popes. In the 1170s, when the election of a six-year-old Holy Roman emperor made it transparently absurd for emperors to choose popes, the Third Lateran Council handed the entire process over to the Sacred College, where it has remained to this day. The years following saw the emergence of the consistory: pope and college meeting together as a governing council. The galero, a wide-brimmed red hat with tassels, had become the sign of membership in the college.

  The rivalry between popes and councils that shaped the career of Alonso de Borja was paralleled by a similar contest between the papacy and the Sacred College. This was, essentially, a struggle to determine whether the Church was going to be a nonhereditary monarchy, ruled by a single supreme leader, or an oligarchy governed by the men with red hats. Both the Babylonian Captivity and the Western Schism happened in large part because of the refusal of the college to accept the pope as monarch. More than a few cardinals showed themselves willing to split the Church, if necessary, to reduce the pontiff to a figurehead.

  As early as 1352, the cardinals’ distrust of papal power introduced yet another new element into the selection of popes. This was the “capitulation,” a promise to which all participating cardinals were expected to subscribe before voting. Many elections came to be preceded by the drafting and adoption of long lists of capitulations. Typically, the cardinals pledged that if elected they would not do certain things: dilute the power of their colleagues by increasing the size of the college, appoint new cardinals without approval of two-thirds of the membership, imprison any cardinal without unanimous approval, or appoint relatives to certain important positions. Such promises figured conspicuously in conclaves throughout the Western Schism and beyond, but the results were practically nil. New popes consistently ignored them, making use of the many ways they had of making their former colleagues dependent upon them for money, for appointment to coveted positions, for any number of things.

  Appointment to the college remained a great prize all the same and attracted the interest of even the greatest of kings. Inevitably in a world where noble and even royal families consigned ch
ildren to careers in the Church for political purposes, the red hat could become the penultimate goal (the pontifical throne being the ultimate one) for power-hungry, greedy men with no interest at all in the religious life. In a Church whose supreme head doubled as the monarch of one of Italy’s most important states—a state that was, inevitably, sometimes in conflict with its neighbors—cardinals who knew how to make war could be worth their weight in holy relics. Thus in the fourteenth century, when Pope Innocent VI wanted to return from Avignon but didn’t dare do so before clearing Rome and the adjacent territory of the ruffians who had taken control, the man he chose for the job was Cardinal Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz, archbishop of Toledo. He proved a good choice. A veteran of Spain’s wars against the Moors, Albornoz took Rome back from the bandit who had established himself as tyrant there and not only subdued most of the Papal States but imposed on them a constitution that would remain in effect into the nineteenth century. It was only his sudden death, and the unraveling of his gains, that obliged the pope to forget about a triumphal return to Rome.

  Albornoz’s successor was another warrior-cardinal, one who if not his equal as a general or administrator definitely surpassed him in savagery. Like Albornoz of royal blood (he was a cousin of the king of France), Robert of Geneva came to be known as the “butcher of Cesena” for allowing some four thousand of that little city’s citizens to be slaughtered in retribution for a rebellion. This, however, did not prevent his being elected the first antipope of the Western Schism (again in contrast to Albornoz, who at the pinnacle of his career refused the papal crown). His reign as Clement VII was undistinguished but free of further atrocities. Mainly he confined himself to selling ecclesiastical offices and doing the bidding of the French crown.