The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  He was not the last of the fighting cardinals, but from the time of the popes’ return to Rome they were a disappearing breed. Gradually the Sacred College was domesticated, its members abandoning the idea of becoming at least equal to the pope and accepting high status in compensation. This new status would become official in the 1460s when the pope of the time, Paul II, conferred on all cardinals the official rank of prince, so that they were recognized across Europe as equal to dukes in the feudal hierarchy and inferior only to the pope and his fellow crowned heads. Thenceforth they would dress in resplendent red robes and be the star performers in a whole new theater of pomp and circumstance. They were not to appear in public except “in state,” accompanied by as many as three hundred uniformed attendants.

  But they were never just puppets in a meaningless bigger-than-life play. They sat with the pope in consistory and so had the opportunity to influence important decisions. Most of them had charge of at least one of the Vatican’s numerous courts, which dealt with cases from every corner of Europe. They also directed the Curia’s most important departments; high rank, good education, and lofty family connections made them useful as diplomats; and they were often employed as legates and governors in the Papal States. Rulers throughout Europe found it advantageous to employ cardinals as advisers or petitioners when favors were wanted from Rome, and often put them on retainer.

  For all these reasons the Sacred College became a hotbed of political and diplomatic intrigue, especially for the states of Italy as they maneuvered for advantage. This was never more true than when the cardinals gathered to elect a new pope; many arrived as agents of whatever secular state had secured their appointment in the first place and were expected to support candidates not unfriendly to that state or even—the best of all possible outcomes—its native sons. History is a trickster, though, and it mocks the best-laid plans. Thus Alonso Borgia was elected precisely because, during his decade in Rome, he had refused to become a player in the politics of the Vatican. It was by becoming the least visible and least feared of cardinals, ironically, that he turned himself into the man of the hour. He was, however, one of those exceptions that prove a rule. The rule in this case was the unsurprising fact that success both in college and in conclave required skill, strength, and clear, practical goals.

  Perhaps the most surprising development of the fifteenth century was the way in which the College of Cardinals gradually became less, rather than more, international. Of the fifteen cardinals at the conclave that elected Alonso Borgia, seven were Italian. Thirty-seven years later, when another conclave elected a second Borgia pope, twenty-three cardinals participated, but only two were not Italian. The Italians had taken over in part because their most powerful families, the rulers of the peninsula’s leading states, had more at stake than their counterparts in more distant places. It had come to seem essential, in the interim between the two elections, that every princely house in Italy not only be represented in the college but place one of its own sons there. It was taken for granted that the college could never be without a Sforza from Milan, a Medici from Florence, an Este from Ferrara, a Gonzaga from Mantua, and an Orsini and a Colonna from Rome and its environs. Among the things demanded of cardinals was, above all, that they live in princely fashion—that they expend their wealth on the construction and adornment of great palaces, the building or rebuilding of the churches and piazzas of Rome, and the recruitment of artists and artisans capable of carrying out such work at the highest level of perfection. Thus could they contribute to fulfilling the dream that Martin V had for Rome when he returned the papacy from its long exile in 1420: that it would again become the glory of the world, a monument in stone to the greatness of the Church.

  That contradictions lay embedded in all this could go without saying. To recruit cardinals from the richest and most powerful families in Italy, to make them both the political instruments of their houses and Rome’s new royalty—these things were easily accomplished. But that these same men should also function as religious leaders, as models of rectitude—that was expecting too much.

  This whole line of discussion inevitably gives rise to questions about the moral standards of the cardinals and other clergy—their sexual behavior in particular—in the fifteenth century. Salacious anecdotes are available in abundance and in a vast array of sources. What is less easy is to determine how meaningful these anecdotes are, how typical of the cardinals, bishops, and priests of the time, and even how true. Alonso Borgia was elected pope 332 years after the First Lateran Council settled a thousand-year debate about clerical celibacy by making it mandatory throughout the Western Church. All clergy thenceforth took vows of chastity. In a milieu where many positions of leadership were held by men who had been assigned to ecclesiastical careers for political and dynastic reasons and where much of the clerical rank and file was without education or training, it is hardly surprising if lapses were commonplace. Complaints about lapses were likewise not rare and came, as often as not, from the clergy itself. The only valid generalization, probably, is that exemplary behavior and gross misbehavior were to be found almost anywhere one looked, and that the College of Cardinals itself was rich in saints and sinners.

  The complex ironies of the situation are encapsulated in what Ludovico Gonzaga, marquess of the city-state of Mantua, told his son in 1460:

  “Although you are a cardinal, be religious.”

  5

  The End of the Beginning

  Don Pedro Luis de Borja—Pierluigi Borgia to the Italians—was still in his mid-twenties when he became the first member of his family to be the most hated man in Rome. He did so not by behaving badly in any way of which a credible record has survived, but by carrying out an assignment that made him the enemy of some of the most badly behaved Romans of his time.

  That assignment, simply described, was to lead an army into the countryside north and west of Rome and take control of it in his uncle the pope’s name. By every measure this was a lawful and legitimate objective, the territories in question having been the property of the Church for fully a thousand years. In practical terms too, it was entirely justified, even necessary, involving as it did a long-overdue challenge to the misrule of the Orsini. For generations—for centuries, actually—the leaders of the Orsini clan had been left free to do whatever they chose in places to which they had no rightful claim without having to account to anyone.

  What they consistently chose, as it happened, was contrary to the interests of everyone involved except the Orsini themselves. The people who worked the land had sunk into a state of profound demoralization after generations of being treated as little better than livestock. In Rome itself disorder and danger became chronic, the Orsini turning the parts of the city that they controlled into killing zones. They showed no reluctance to shut down the highways leading to the city’s gates and so cut off its supplies of food, fuel, and other essentials whenever it served their purposes to do so.

  Though Calixtus III was by no means the first pontiff to set out to regain control of at least some part of the Papal States, his approach was novel in one important respect. In the regions closest to Rome in particular, his predecessors had commonly used one baronial clan as a weapon with which to bludgeon another into submission, supporting now the Colonna against the Orsini, now the Orsini against the Colonna. Almost invariably this turned out to be a self-defeating strategy, because whatever could be taken from the clan targeted for attack tended to end up in the hands not of the Church but of the clan that had done the attacking in the pope’s name. The result was an endlessly repeating pattern in which, as pope succeeded pope, the fortunes of the Orsini and the Colonna became like two pistons in a reciprocating engine, with one side up whenever the other was down. Where the Church was concerned nothing really changed: the Papal States, and much of the old capital, remained out of control.

  By appointing his nephew captain-general and sending him against the Orsini, Calixtus gave himself a chance, at least, of holding on to t
he fruits of any victories the campaign might achieve. The only serious disadvantage affected Pedro Luis personally: he became a marked man, conspicuous as both the leader and the symbol of his uncle’s war. By contrast, his brother Cardinal Rodrigo and their cousin Cardinal Luis Juan del Milà—the former far away in the March of Ancona when Pedro Luis took the field, the latter even farther away in Bologna—could take comfort in being almost forgotten men.

  The process by which the wrath of the Orsini came to be focused on Pedro Luis unfolded very gradually. The first favor that his uncle bestowed on him upon becoming pope, the governorship of the great citadel of Castel Sant’Angelo, caused little concern if any. At this early point in his reign Calixtus appeared to have no objectives except to mount a crusade against the Turks, and there was no reason to suspect that in disposing of the Castel he had anything more in mind than to raise a young favorite to a position of some prestige. Later, when Pedro Luis became the Vatican’s captain-general, it again seemed nothing more than a harmless act of nepotistic largesse, without political significance and no threat to anyone. But soon Pedro Luis was not merely enjoying an impressive title and the handsome income that went with it, but actually making war. On the Orsini. At that point everything changed.

  The campaign went surpassingly well. Advancing out of Rome, Pedro Luis took control, generally at the direct expense of the Orsini, of more towns and fortresses than can be named here. Of Terni, Narni, and Rieti; Todi, Orvieto, and Foligno; Nocera, Assisi, and Amelia; not only the whole of the province called the Patrimony of St. Peter but the part of Tuscany that belonged to the popes; finally even the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento and the great fortress of Terracina far to the south. This culminated in Pedro Luis’s appointment, in April 1457, to the important post of prefect of Rome. The position had become vacant with the death of the latest in an unbroken line of Orsini prefects reaching back so far that the family had come to regard it as theirs by hereditary right. With the office they lost also—were obliged to surrender to Pedro Luis—the coastal city of Civitavecchia and much of the territory abutting Lake Vico north of Rome. These were serious losses; things were getting difficult for the Orsini, even alarming, as one possession after another was being torn out of their hands and Pedro Luis continued to press on. Cardinal Latino Orsini, long one of the most powerful men in Rome, found his situation so uncomfortable that he slipped away to the countryside.

  The Colonna, of course, were delighted with everything that was happening and delighted also with Calixtus and his captain-general. His connection to the pope, his victories, and his growing number of offices made Pedro Luis the most attractive marital prize in central Italy, and soon there was talk of his betrothal to a Colonna bride. Everything he had gained and everything he still hoped to accomplish depended, however, on the survival of his uncle, and Calixtus was growing steadily more frail and finding it increasingly difficult to leave his bed. He continued to send out streams of instructions, exhortations, and appeals, willing himself to generate more activity than many of his younger, healthier predecessors, but that he was in serious decline is suggested by a letter sent to Rodrigo in the March of Ancona. It was written not by Calixtus himself but by his old friend Enea Silvio Piccolomini, a seasoned Vatican diplomat who had recently been made a cardinal at the urging of Germany’s Holy Roman emperor and the king of Hungary.

  Boiled down to its essence, the letter was an appeal to Rodrigo Borgia to return to Rome. “Would to God that this were granted,” Piccolomini wrote, “the sooner the better; for your return would be very useful; you would be a comfort to the great aged Pontiff, your uncle, who, absorbed by constant anxieties, finds no relief. Your very presence would be an enjoyment for him, since it is sweet to mind and heart to be with one of your own blood.”

  It was not for Rodrigo to decide when he should return to Rome, of course. But the question was soon decided for him, and a lonely old man’s wish to have someone of his “own blood” near at hand may have had something to do with the startling way in which it happened. In the autumn of 1457 Calixtus sent a letter “to our beloved son, Rodrigo,” informing his nephew that he was again being promoted, this time to a post that would elevate him above all other members of the College of Cardinals. He was to report to Rome and take up the duties of vice-chancellor of the Church, the highest position in the hierarchy after the papacy itself. If the pope could be thought of as in effect the Church’s chairman and chief executive, and the College of Cardinals as analogous to a board of directors, the vice-chancellor was the pope’s right hand, a chief operating officer responsible for managing much of the Curia’s vast administrative apparatus as well as overseeing the collection of revenues and the granting of benefices and favors. The office also gave Rodrigo—fittingly enough, insofar as he had a doctorate in law—charge of the Sacred Romana Rota, the Vatican’s highest court with twelve judges and a large staff of advocates and notaries. If some cardinals were surprised at seeing a position of such reach and power conferred upon a twenty-six-year-old, the fact that the nominee was a relative of the pope’s appears to have offended no one. As Cardinal Piccolomini’s letter to Rodrigo showed, the pontiff’s need for lieutenants in whom he could place firm personal trust was understood. The last man to serve as vice-chancellor—the post had been vacant since 1453—had been a nephew of Eugenius IV.

  As if all this were not more than enough, Rodrigo was simultaneously appointed “chief and general commissary of the pontifical army.” This amorphous title, suggestive to modern ears of procurement and food service, in fact conferred upon the young cardinal not only command over all the officers of the papal armed forces, his brother the captain-general included, but responsibility for overseeing whatever wars the Vatican might be engaged in and authority to enter into treaties with the warlords whose little domains studded the map of the Papal States. It made Rodrigo not so much a field general—never in his life would he claim to have either experience or competence as a soldier—as his uncle’s minister for war. Thus when he finally departed the March of Ancona, probably in November 1457, it was to take up in Rome an astonishingly heavy array of responsibilities. He took with him, as the residue of almost a year of restoring order in the March, direct experience of the lawlessness that poisoned life in the Papal States and new, well-earned confidence in his own ability to deal with such matters. It was a time of extraordinary personal growth for Rodrigo, as his uncle heaped more and more work on his shoulders and he showed himself capable of handling it. The process of being tested and tested again and never found wanting was lifting him to a position of primacy among the pope’s three nephews.

  The months following his return to Rome appear to have been a comparatively quiet time for Rodrigo. He gets little mention in the reports of the ambassadors at the Vatican, which is not surprising in light of the time and attention that must have been required for him to take up the reins of the chancery with its many departments, the Rota, and the papal military. He also had to set up a household, one both appropriate to his new eminence and big enough to provide working space for his suddenly enormous number of subordinates. His brother Pedro Luis was ill that winter of 1457–58, so that the papal army was even less active than it ordinarily would have been at that time of year. Calixtus from his bed continued to try to muster reinforcements for Scarampo’s little force in the eastern Mediterranean and continued to be rebuffed. He and Rodrigo would have spent many hours conferring.

  New popes, upon taking office, were required to surrender whatever offices and benefices they had held at the time of their election, distributing them as administrative or political considerations required or as their personal preferences suggested. Calixtus of course had conformed to this rule, but in the two years following his coronation he had done nothing to fill the vacant see of Valencia, the only bishopric he had held when a cardinal. Because Valencia was the Borgia family’s home diocese, and also no doubt because it was one of the richest and most prestigious sees on the Iberian peninsul
a, Calixtus wanted to give it to Rodrigo, whose mother was presumably still living in its episcopal palace. Though from a Roman perspective vastly less important than the vice-chancellorship or the war ministry, the see turned out to be much more difficult for the pope to bestow as he wished, because others had designs on it. Calixtus’s old master and now-nemesis Alfonso V wanted it for one of his son Ferrante’s numerous offspring, while Alfonso’s brother King Juan of Navarre saw it as a suitable perch for one of his sons. This was not an unusual conflict; disagreements over who had the right to appoint bishops and archbishops had been setting kings and popes at odds with each other almost as long as Europe had had kings and popes, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Confronted with such formidable competition, Calixtus sensibly hesitated to act. There were limits to how far even a pope could go in defying the family that ruled much of the Mediterranean world.

  Everything changed in May 1458 when Alfonso V fell ill. Still boiling with vitality and ambition, until suddenly obliged to retire to his bed he had been preparing the next of his attacks on Genoa, whose colonial outposts he had never stopped coveting. He declined rapidly but lingered for some forty days, the royal physicians trying every available remedy to no avail. When death came on June 27 it removed from the scene the mightiest monarch and one of the most brilliant personalities of his time. King of Aragon and Valencia, of Majorca and Sardinia and Corsica and Sicily and Naples, count of Barcelona and Rousillon, he was as fascinatingly paradoxical a character as any biographer could hope to find: sincerely religious but also utterly untrustworthy; kindly and generous but also ruthlessly, insatiably ambitious; a great patron of the arts and an endless source of trouble for Italy’s other rulers. He might have been the man to unify Italy—he certainly intended to be—if at various times and in various ways he had not been thwarted by the Sforzas of Milan, the Medici of Florence, and the popes in Rome. Blocked by Venice and the Turks from creating the empire that he hungered for in the East, he had retaliated by creating endless difficulties for both. He had dominated the political stage for so long that his disappearance, which the embalming process showed to have been the result of an abscess on his lung, left everyone in a state of stunned uncertainty. The kingdom of Naples, which during his reign had been inexhaustibly aggressive, suddenly went limp.