by G. J. Meyer
Alfonso’s intended heir Ferrante, his claim to the crown seriously in doubt, was immediately thrown on the defensive. This brought a sense of deliverance in many quarters. Almost overnight Venice found that it had one fewer rival in the Aegean and other eastern places; thus it felt free to be less hostile toward Skanderbeg of Albania. This freed the Albanians, in turn, to focus on rebuilding their strength in anticipation of renewed Turkish aggression. Genoa felt that a black cloud had been removed from over its head, and for a while politics became less thorny for the Italian states generally.
No one was more delighted than Calixtus. “The bond is broken,” he exclaimed, “and we are free!” Free not only of Alfonso’s endless meddling in the affairs of Rome and the Papal States, but free also to set Naples on an entirely new course in which Ferrante would have no part. The legal complexities of the succession question were enormous, but in all Europe there was no one better prepared to deal with them than the onetime legal scholar Alonso de Borja. Drawing upon his professional knowledge, he found a sound basis for arguing that, when Eugenius IV invested Alfonso with the crown of Naples, the king had been granted life tenure only, with no right of succession. No less significantly, Europe’s feudal code made it virtually indisputable that legitimization did not carry with it the right of inheritance, especially with respect to thrones. Calixtus issued a bull declaring that with Alfonso’s death the fief of Naples had reverted to the Holy See. He said that as pope he was at liberty to bestow the crown wherever he wished—or to bestow it on no one. Ferrante, who had long shared the responsibilities of rule with his father and at age thirty-five was a seasoned and formidably shrewd politician, sent envoys to Rome to argue his case. To the extent that they were given a hearing, it was a distinctly frosty one.
Suggestions that the pope had a hidden agenda—that he hoped to make the Borgias the ruling dynasty of Naples—are not easily squared with what we know of Calixtus’s character, the existence of several candidates possessing both royal blood and powerful support, and the certain fact that any attempt to confer the crown on Pedro Luis or any other Borgia would have aroused ferocious opposition not only throughout Italy but across Europe. Ferrante’s most obvious rival was Juan of Navarre, whose entitlement to every part of his brother Alfonso’s empire except—just possibly—Naples was beyond possibility of challenge. The thought of Juan inheriting Naples was not a comfortable one for Rome, however, because the vast reserves of manpower and wealth available to him as ruler of Aragon and Sicily and numerous other places would enable him to become the same kind of danger Alfonso had been. To the Aragonese argument that Sicily and Naples went together, so that if Juan was king of Sicily he was entitled to Naples as well, Calixtus replied that the so-called Union of Two Sicilies had been created for the benefit of Alfonso alone and was dissolved by his death.
Yet another twist was the fact that Juan had two sons who were not churchmen, were both legitimate though born to different mothers, and had rival claims to be their father’s heir. The elder of the two, Carlos of Viana, was not only alienated from his father, who favored his younger half-brother Ferdinand, but literally at war with him. It was undoubtedly for this reason that Calixtus declared Carlos’s claim to Naples to be worthy of consideration; it was a way of keeping Juan off balance. The pope said similarly encouraging things about the claim of the House of Anjou, the branch of the French royal family that Alfonso had driven out of Naples fifteen years before. He pledged to “do my utmost to deliver my successor” by excluding Ferrante not only from the throne but even from the list of candidates. Clearly this was his main objective where Naples was concerned. His second was to keep the kingdom from falling into the hands of anyone as powerful as Juan.
On June 30 he cut the Gordian knot, assembling the cardinals in consistory and securing their approval of Rodrigo as bishop of Valencia. At the same time, in an effort to placate the House of Aragon, he got consent to the bestowal of the archbishopric of Zaragoza upon a third son of King Juan. The gesture failed; the new archbishop’s royal father was neither satisfied nor grateful. Being now in possession of his late brother’s international empire, he believed himself entitled to choose his own bishops, especially on his home ground in Spain. And there were practical reasons for his discontent. The bishopric of Valencia was substantially more lucrative than the archbishopric of Zaragoza, producing as it did an income of nearly twenty thousand ducats per year. Calixtus, however, had made up his mind. He was determined to keep Valencia in the family and not to let the opportunity created by Alfonso’s death slip away unused.
In Naples, meanwhile, Ferrante was showing his determination to become king regardless of what the pope thought. When Calixtus repeated his old assertion that neither Ferrante nor Naples had any claim to Benevento or Terracina or the territories surrounding, Ferrante moved to secure both places with his troops. Pedro Luis then moved the papal army southward to the frontier, where he paused to await developments. A further move by either side would be the start of a war.
By that time July was well advanced, bringing with it the heat and humidity that invariably descended upon Rome in midsummer. Daily life became a punishment even for the young and healthy, and malaria and plague began to ravage the population. For an eighty-year-old pope who had long been an invalid it was murderous, making the long days nearly unendurable and sleep difficult even at night. From ancient times it had been part of the rhythm of Roman life for everyone who could do so to withdraw to the cool of the hill country. But in 1458, either because he had so much to do or because he was too weak to travel, Calixtus did not go. The result was predictable: he became seriously ill and soon was unable to attend to business. Reports that he was dying spread. The members of the baronial clans who had not left the city, already short-tempered thanks to the oppressive weather, began to make plans for taking advantage of his passing.
On July 26, upon receiving unsettling reports about his uncle’s condition, Rodrigo left his hilltop retreat in Tivoli and hurried the twenty-five miles back to the Vatican. Pedro Luis may have done likewise, because in the course of the next several days Calixtus rallied sufficiently to dictate a bull making him vicar—not duke, but governor—of Benevento and Terracina. The pope must have believed, or hoped at least, that he was not dying, because he certainly understood that such a bull could mean nothing in the event of his death.
As August began, the imminence of the pope’s death was taken for granted everywhere. This brought to the enemies of the Borgias the liberating conviction that they no longer had anything to fear. That the hour of vengeance had arrived. For the Orsini especially, but for some of the city’s lesser clans as well, the effect was exhilarating. They took to the streets and summoned their rural kinsmen to join them. It became dangerous to be a Spaniard, never mind a Borgia, anywhere in Rome. The Spanish were attacked if they left their homes, and at least a few were killed. Houses were set afire, along with the warehouses of Spanish merchants. Many of the papal household’s Spanish employees stopped showing up for work.
The danger was greatest for Pedro Luis; the Orsini hated no one as they hated him. It became impossible for him to show his face in public. As Calixtus faded into unconsciousness, many of the cardinals turned against his captain-general, demanding that he relinquish control of the Castel Sant’Angelo and other key fortresses. The Orsini and their henchmen grew bolder by the hour. It had become questionable whether Pedro Luis—whether any member of his family—could survive either by remaining in the city or by trying to get away.
The Borgias of Rome had arrived at their first great crisis.
6
Surviving
Calixtus was not yet dead when the contempt of the Roman citizenry for the Spanish interlopers they called “Catalans” rose to a murderous pitch.
The pontiff was not himself an object of this hatred or of the blood-lust to which it gave rise. Though the Romans sometimes called him a “barbarian” pope, this was less because he had done anything to give o
ffense—or was perceived as an offensive figure, even—than because he was not Italian, had come to Rome as a man of advanced years, and so would always be an outsider. Against a man who lived as simply and virtuously as Calixtus did, one so determined to go on doing his duty as the infirmities of old age bore down on him, not even the Romans could work up much hostility.
Although he was left to die almost alone as the members of his largely Spanish household slipped fearfully away, Calixtus was therefore never in danger. No one objected to letting him expire in peace.
It was different for his countrymen, most different of all for the young Borgias whom he had raised to princely status. They were marked men. Pedro Luis, prefect of Rome and captain-general of the papal troops, master in his uncle’s name of more towns and territories than anyone could readily name or even count, was in danger from the moment the pope’s illness became widely known. By the first days of August it was no longer possible to be confident that Pedro Luis was going to escape with his life.
This part of our story would be simpler if more were known about what kind of man Pedro Luis actually was. But the evidence is too thin and too dubious to bring him into focus. That he was raised high at a precocious age, and was bitterly resented by those who saw his advancement as an affront and a threat, we have already seen. What is not clear is whether and to what extent he had done anything to justify the hatred that was directed at him. Did it happen simply because he was a Spaniard and a Borgia and conscientious in the execution of the duties assigned to him by the pope? Or was he in fact the kind of man who would have been hated even if he had been Roman from birth?
Down the centuries, Pedro Luis has often been depicted as everyone’s image of a Spanish nobleman-warrior in the age of the conquistadores: proud, arrogant, cruel, and therefore despised by decent people. He has also been described as self-defeatingly stupid—a defect not often found among the Borgias—and doomed for that reason. Possibly he was all these things, but it is equally possible that he was none of them. Practically all of the unflattering accounts of his character can be traced no further back than to people who had never met him, people who were not alive when he was but had political or religious reasons to think him a typically evil member of a uniquely vicious clan. In Pedro Luis we encounter for the first time the great challenge of Borgia history: the need to distinguish between what can be accepted as true or at least probable on the basis of credible evidence and what was fabricated after the fact but has been endlessly repeated because of its usefulness in showing yet another Borgia to have been odious. What is known for sure about Pedro Luis is sufficient neither to condemn him nor to declare him grievously misunderstood. It is difficult to judge even his performance as a military commander, so little being known about the opposition he faced, the resources he had at his disposal, or how he conducted himself while in action.
On August 5, 1458, in any case, the truth about Pedro Luis’s character and conduct was far less urgent than the question of his survival. On the previous day, with Calixtus visibly losing his grip on life and the clans rampaging in the streets, a delegation of cardinals had called on the captain-general and demanded that he surrender the one absolutely secure place of refuge in Rome, the Castel Sant’Angelo. He had agreed, but only after being promised the twenty-two thousand gold ducats that he claimed were owed him by the pontifical treasury. (There is no way of judging the legitimacy of this debt, but it is entirely plausible that Pedro Luis expended this much or more out of his own pocket in the discharge of his many duties.) A deal having been struck, attention shifted to getting him out of Rome.
This turned out to require both guile and a show of force. Between them, Cardinal Rodrigo as de facto Vatican war minister and Pedro Luis as captain-general were able to muster some three thousand mounted troops and two hundred infantry. This little army, after being formed into a protective phalanx around the mounted Pedro Luis, was paraded with attention-compelling ostentation out of the Vatican and across the Milvian Bridge, obviously headed out of the city. But as it approached the Porta del Popolo, a major exit point known to be in the hands of the Orsini, Rodrigo and a friend from the College of Cardinals, Pietro Barbo, slipped away with a smaller, less conspicuous company of troops, taking a disguised Pedro Luis with them. Upon reaching the Porta San Paolo, having determined that the road ahead was clear, the two cardinals bade Pedro Luis farewell and turned back into the city. Pedro Luis galloped downriver toward Ostia on the coast, taking his gold with him. There he waited to be picked up by a galley that never came, finally hiring a fishing boat that took him the forty miles up the coast to the papal fortress of Civitavecchia, which he commanded as captain-general.
Rodrigo returned to the Vatican—an act of some courage under the circumstances—and was with his uncle when he died the following day. Rome was in a state of near-anarchy. Rodrigo did nothing to protect his “palace”—still little more than a strung-together assortment of recently derelict buildings, used mainly as a workplace for the employees of the papal chancery—and so it was stripped bare. He must have had relatively little worth stealing at this point, and trying to hold off the mob could only have inflamed its wrath. By in effect throwing open his doors he relieved some of the hostility directed at him as a Catalan, a Borgia, and the dead pontiff’s fellow barbarian.
Attention now turned, to the extent that anyone could focus his attention in the midst of so much disorder, to the ceremonials involved in burying a pope and preparing for the election of a successor. It could go without saying that there was not the smallest possibility of Rodrigo Borgia being chosen or even considered; his youth would have disqualified him had there been no other negatives. By the time of Calixtus’s interment, those cardinals hopeful of election were well along with their campaigning. There was considerable expectation—probably proclaimed most strongly by the candidate himself—that the all-but-certain winner was Guillaume d’Estouteville, cardinal of Rouen. He was fabulously wealthy, a cousin of the king of France, openly ambitious for the throne, haughty, vain, of dubious moral character—and for all these reasons disliked by more of his fellow cardinals than he appears to have understood. In the days just after Calixtus’s death, the most popular contender had been Domenico Capranica, the same admired theologian whose candidacy had been blocked by Latino Orsini at the conclave of 1455. This time his chances looked better, but just three days before the opening of the conclave he threw everyone’s calculations into confusion by unexpectedly dying, aged fifty-eight. No doubt this confirmed for Estouteville that God himself was clearing a path to his election. The next five days, however, would demonstrate the wisdom of an ancient proverb: he who enters the conclave a pope, exits a cardinal.
The first secret ballot, taken after two days of discussion, produced a surprising result. Estouteville received not a single vote, meaning that he hadn’t voted for himself. This may have been an obscure strategic move on the Frenchman’s part, but it also sheds light on just how little his election was desired. Enea Silvio Piccolomini of Siena and Filippo Calandrini of Bologna received five votes each. The remaining ballots were scattered among an essentially random assortment of cardinals, none of whom had a chance of being elected.
That night Estouteville went into action, lobbying hard, offering bribes, and threatening retribution to any who declined to cooperate. He told his colleagues one by one, in feigned confidence, that he was a single vote short of the needed two-thirds majority, and he painted an enticing picture of the rewards that awaited the man who put him over the top. Obviously he was setting the stage for an overwhelming show of support in the next day’s voting. What happened next cannot be told better than in the words of the man who was about to emerge as Estouteville’s sole rival, Cardinal Piccolomini. In his written account of the conclave—a document unique in history, no cardinal before or since having produced anything comparable—Piccolomini refers to himself in the third person as “Enea.” He recounts how offended he was, on the night of August 18, to disco
ver that Estouteville had stationed himself in the latrine (“a fit place for such a pope to be elected!” he exclaims) and was using every possible promise and threat in a bare-knuckles push for votes. And how, after being warned that he himself had better get on the bandwagon before it was too late, Piccolomini went to bed resolved to launch a stop-Estouteville campaign upon rising the next morning. His memoir continues:
Enea went at daybreak to Rodrigo, the vice-chancellor, and asked whether he had sold himself to Rouen. “What would you have me do?” he answered. “The thing is settled. Many of the cardinals have met in the privies and decided to elect him. It is not for my advantage to remain with a small minority out of favor with a new pope. I am joining the majority and I have looked out for my own interests. I shall not lose the chancellorship; I have a note from Rouen assuring me of that. If I do not vote for him, the others will elect him anyway and I shall be stripped of my office.”
