The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  Other disappointments followed. Ferrante of Naples had met the Angevin invaders and his rebellious barons in battle and been whipped by them soundly; he was in serious jeopardy as a result, raising the possibility that Pius had made a costly mistake in recognizing him as king. And suddenly, up in the Romagna, the pope had a war of his own to fight, thanks to a troublesome vassal named Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, lord of Rimini. Worse still, from Rome came reports of a new conspiracy to expel the papal government and declare a republic. If the pope didn’t return soon, he was warned, he could find himself in exile like Eugenius IV twenty years before.

  As a crowning blow—the reader familiar with the reputation of the Borgias has perhaps been expecting something of this kind—Pius was visiting the healing waters of Petriolo when word reached him that back in Siena his right hand, his brilliant and beloved young vice-chancellor, had become embroiled in an absolutely outlandish scandal.

  The dark side of the Borgia legend was at last beginning to unfold.

  Background

  THE ETERNAL CITY, ETERNALLY REBORN

  NO ONE SHOULD HAVE BEEN SURPRISED THAT SUCH PUBLIC order as the city of Rome enjoyed at the end of the 1450s began to disintegrate when Pius II removed the papal court to Mantua and did not return for almost a year and a half.

  It was becoming all too clear, by this time, that Rome could not function—could not even survive as more than a crime-infested backwater—in the absence of the papal court. That whenever a pope was away for more than brief interludes, the city actually began to die. And that when the popes returned, its heart began to beat again. The so-called Eternal City was, ironically, the least stable, least vital, and least self-sufficient of Italy’s great capitals.

  The Rome of Pius II’s time would not be recognizable to visitors from the twenty-first century any more than to visitors from the first. Its population, which totaled a million or more in the days of the Caesars and had dwindled to a pathetic twenty-five thousand at the start of the fifteenth century, cannot have been much more than fifty thousand in the 1460s. The remains of the old imperial capital were of course in ruins, most of the oldest palaces and churches having been either dismantled for their stone or transformed into makeshift fortifications behind which frightened families huddled for protection. Most of the people lived in squalor, crowded into the tangle of dark, narrow, and filthy streets that had taken shape helter-skelter around the Pantheon. Only one of the magnificent viaducts that once had supplied the city with water was still in working order, and few of the churches and palaces that are the glory of the city today had yet been built. St. Peter’s Basilica was falling apart, and most of the fabled Roman hills had been given over to crops and livestock. Anyone looking down from one of those hills would have been struck first by the innumerable towers that studded the landscape. There were towers at the ends of the bridges across the Tiber, towers on what remained of the city wall, towers rising out of the fortress-homes of every family that could afford one. They were expressions of fear, these towers—of the need for vigilance in a chronically lawless place.

  “The city is for the most part in ruins,” the poet Giannantonio Campano reported upon seeing it for the first time at midcentury, “and in such terrible condition that tears came to my eyes. The inhabitants are more like barbarians than Romans; they are repellent of aspect and speak the most different dialects.” Such words become all the more striking when one realizes that they were written fully a generation after Pope Martin V began the city’s revival. At the time they were written Nicholas V’s drive to restore Rome’s splendor was fully under way.

  The Rome of the early Renaissance did have one important thing in common with the capital of the Caesars. Both were parasite cities, devourers rather than creators of wealth. As the historian Theodor Mommsen observed, “there has perhaps never been a great city so thoroughly destitute of the means of support as Rome.” Through all the centuries when it was the center of the known world, it gave rise to no important banking institutions or manufacturing operations or anything except the bureaucracies needed for the management of a great empire. And so when the empire ceased to exist, there was no longer much reason for Rome. It was far from alone in imploding—that was the fate of urban Europe generally, one of the things that made the Dark Ages dark. But when other cities once again began to show signs of economic life, growing and generating wealth, Rome was left behind. Lacking merchants and bankers of consequence, it failed to share in the benefits brought to other places by the emergence of a commercial middle class. Finally nothing much remained but a semirural population scattered rather wretchedly among decaying ruins and at the mercy of gangster-like clans.

  These clans were a constant of Roman history from the Dark Ages onward. They accumulated wealth and power while successive popes were occupied with beating back German emperors as they invaded Italy and beating down attempts to establish republican government in the city. By the late thirteenth century the clan chiefs, titled nobility or “barons” now, had nearly succeeded in making the papacy their personal property and were exploiting it ruthlessly to their own advantage.

  The endless, grinding street wars in which the clans fought one another for dominance made Rome literally ungovernable for a very long time. The withdrawal of the papacy to Avignon allowed the barons to go unchallenged except by one another through much of the fourteenth century. A chronicler described the Rome of that time as “everywhere lust, everywhere evil, no justice, no law; there was no longer any escape; the man who was strongest with the sword was the most in the right. A person’s only hope was to defend himself with the help of his relatives and friends; every day groups of armed men were formed.” And every night those same groups ventured out to kill one another in the streets.

  The feeble communal government that was pretending to rule Rome collapsed when Martin V brought the papacy back to the city in 1420. The clans, however, remained strong, and would plague every pope for the next two centuries. Conditions began to improve all the same; by introducing a modicum of law and order, Martin sparked a process of recovery. That process gathered momentum until 1434, when the Colonna drove Eugenius IV into his eight years of exile. He had not been gone long when the city again began descending into anarchy, but a measure of stability was restored with his return. As the papacy gradually recovered its strength, drawing money to the Vatican and creating increasing numbers of jobs, Rome recovered with it. Its evolution into a leading center of Renaissance culture was interrupted briefly by the republican conspiracy against Nicholas V in 1453, more seriously at the end of that decade when Pius II departed for Mantua and stayed away too long.

  Eventually the people of Rome, even the barons, resigned themselves to the truth: the city had no place in the world except as the seat of a monarchy sufficiently important to bring riches from the outside world, a monarchy on which its subjects could feed. Thus there was no substitute for the papacy, and the republican dream was pure folly, leading to nothing but disorder and decline. This was not a particularly welcome truth, but it was inescapable all the same. Once it was understood, opposition to papal rule was finished. It became impossible to muster popular support for any other kind of regime.

  The barons, however, remained determined to preserve their power. Every new pope had to work out his own way of dealing with them.

  7

  Pius II: Troubles Rumored and Real

  It surely makes sense, before arriving at conclusions about the first accusation of scandalous misconduct ever leveled at Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, to pause and consider just what it is that we actually know about the incident.

  We know that in June 1460 Pope Pius II was still lingering in Tuscany, where he and his entourage had stopped en route back to Rome from Mantua. And that on the eleventh day of that month, from the retreat where he was taking the waters, the pope sent a letter to Rodrigo in Siena. This letter is unique; we know of no similar communication, no comparably stern and explicit rebuke, ever addressed
by a reigning pope to a member of the Sacred College on a matter of personal behavior. The matters with which it deals, the things it reveals, and the ease with which editing can manipulate its meaning require that it be considered in full.

  Beloved Son,

  We have learned that three days ago a large number of the women of Siena, adorned with all worldly vanity, gathered in the gardens of our well-beloved son Giovanni de Bichis, and that your Eminence, in contempt of the dignity of your position, remained with them from one o’clock until six o’clock in the afternoon; and that you had in your company another Cardinal to whom at least his age, if not the honor of the Holy See, should have recalled his duty. We are told that the dances were immodest and the seductions of love beyond bounds and that you yourself behaved as if you were one of the most vulgar young men of the age. In truth I should blush to set down in detail all I have been told of what happened. Not only these things themselves, but the mere mention of them, are a dishonor to the office you hold. In order to have more freedom for your amusements you forbade entry to the husbands, fathers, brothers, and relations who came with these young women. You two, with a handful of attendants, were the sole organizers and instigators. It seems that at this moment no other thing is spoken of in the town of Siena and that you are the laughingstock of everybody. Assuredly here, in the baths, where there is a great crowd of ecclesiastics and laymen, you are on everybody’s tongue. If I said I was not angry at these matters, I should commit a grave error. We are more angry than we can say, for it is a cause of dishonor to the ecclesiastical state and contempt for our ministry; it gives a pretext to those who accuse us of using our wealth and our high office for orgies, it is such things as these that cause the small esteem in which we are held by princes and powers, the daily mockery of the laity, and the reprobation hurled at our own conduct when we undertake to reprove others. The Vicar of Christ himself is an object of scorn because it is believed that he closes his eyes to these excesses.

  You preside, my dear son, over the Church of Valencia, one of the most important in Spain; likewise you rule over the pontifical Chancellory; and what renders your act more reprehensible is that you are stationed close to the Sovereign Pontiff as Counselor of the Holy See. We leave it to your own judgment to say if it befits your high degree to pay compliments to women, to be sending them fruit, to drink a mouthful of wine and then have the glass carried to the woman who pleases you most, to spend a whole day as a delighted spectator of all kinds of games; and finally, for the sake of your liberty, to exclude from the gathering the husbands and relations of the women who are invited.

  Your faults reflect upon us, and upon Calixtus, your uncle of happy memory, who is accused of a great fault of judgment for having laden you with undeserved honors. Your youth is not to be alleged in your defense, for it is not so tender and you are capable of realizing the responsibilities that your dignity places upon your shoulders. It behooves a cardinal to be irreproachable, to be a salutary example to all in the morality of his life, and the model of an existence which not only is edifying and profitable to the soul but is so exteriorly as well. We are indignant when secular princes approach us for dishonorable reasons, when they do us wrong by coveting our properties and our benefices, and when we must bend to their demands. It is ourselves who inflict upon us the wounds from which we suffer when we so act that the authority of the Church is less respected from day to day. We bear the shame of our conduct in this world, and we shall suffer the punishment we have deserved in the world to come.

  Let your Eminence then decide to put an end to these frivolities; you must remember your dignity and cease to appear among your youthful contemporaries in the likeness of a man of pleasure. If such acts were repeated we should be obliged to show that they happen totally in spite of us and against our will; and our reproaches would be cast in such terms as would put you to the blush. We have always loved you and regarded you as worthy of our protection, because we have taken you for a model of gravity and modesty. Let us long keep this opinion and this conviction, and to this end you must without delay enter upon a much more serious way of life. Your youth, the pledge of amendment, causes us to warn you paternally. If you had allowed yourself such things at the age of your companion, we should no longer be able to do you this charitable service.

  The explosive word here, the one that seizes attention by crystallizing things otherwise left implicit, is of course orgies. Is it possible to read it without imagining two clerics, naked perhaps except for their red hats, flitting from one giggling lady to another among Signore de Bichis’s shrubs while the husbands, fathers, and brothers of those same ladies loiter disconsolately on the other side of the garden wall? Could we hope for better proof of the libertine that Cardinal Rodrigo was in his prime—of his inability to keep his appetites in check even when the failure to do so put his future at risk and betrayed the pope who had become almost a father to him?

  We could, actually. To understand why, it is necessary to distinguish between what Pius himself knew when, in a burst of understandable anger, he wrote his letter, and what he was supposing to be true. And between what we as readers actually learn from his letter, and what his words merely lead us to surmise. The first thing to note is that, though Pius’s pain at what he has been told about the conduct of his “beloved son” has so destroyed not only his composure but the usual polish of his Latin prose that the letter has sometimes been dismissed as a forgery, he acknowledges even as he unburdens himself that he is dealing with hearsay—with what “I have been told.”

  Note also what Pius, who cares passionately about maintaining high standards and has been living and working in close association with Rodrigo for perhaps five years, reveals in his letter about what experience has taught him to expect of his young protégé. Far from saying that enough is enough and habitual mischievous antics have crossed a line and become intolerable, he declares that one reason for his shock is the fact the reported outrages have been committed by a man who has always seemed to him “a model of gravity and modesty.”

  Consider finally the inherent credibility of the tale that Pius in his anger has leaped to believe. We know from other sources that the party had been arranged because a child was being baptized—one whose parents were of sufficient status to have their invitations accepted by two of the cardinals who had accompanied the pope to Tuscany. Because of the rank of the people involved, the party took place in the gardens of an esteemed friend of the pope’s, a “well-beloved son.” But we are asked to believe that, upon arriving for the festivities, the male guests (individuals of considerable social standing) were turned away while their ladies (including unmarried girls) were allowed to enter. And that for the next five hours these ladies disported themselves with the cardinals—one of whom at least has long been known to the pontiff to be a man of good character—in ways that Pius would “blush to set down in detail.” These were the womenfolk of the Sienese elite, mind you, at a time when gentlemen carried swords and were prepared to kill over questions of honor. Yet this horrific episode somehow became merely Tuscany’s joke of the hour, with no harm done except to the already sullied reputation of the clergy.

  The best that can be said of such a story is that it pushes credulity to the breaking point. It sounds ludicrous to twenty-first-century ears and would have been even more implausible in Renaissance Italy. And it is, for that matter, pretty thoroughly undermined by what happened after Pius’s explosion. A few days later he sent a second message, this time in response to something Rodrigo had written after receiving the first. It shows the pope to be in a considerably altered frame of mind. He has, he says,

  received your Eminence’s letter and taken note of the explanation you give. Your action, my dear child, cannot be free from fault, though it may perhaps be less grave than I was first told. We exhort you to refrain henceforth from such indiscretions and to take the greatest care of your reputation. We grant you the pardon you ask; if we did not love you as a son of predilection we s
hould not have uttered our affectionate reproaches for it is written: “Whom I love, him I rebuke and punish.” So long as you do good and live in modesty, you will have in me a father and a protector whose blessing will be showered likewise upon those who are dear to you.

  We still don’t know what happened at that party—the ladies’ displays of their dancing skills touched the bounds of propriety, perhaps?—but Pius is satisfied that it was not what he had first been told. Orgies have been demoted to indiscretions, and instead of hurt and anger the pope is directing “affectionate reproaches” at Rodrigo. Any suspicion that something truly scandalous has transpired, or that Pius has decided after reflection that boys will be boys and not too much should be expected of his young favorite, now looks distinctly implausible. It cannot be without significance that, in the weeks following the notorious garden party, Pius II saw no need to depart Siena or send Rodrigo away. They did not go until the end of September, after the summer heat had loosened its grip on Rome, and departed then only because called away by developments too serious to be ignored.

  It is likewise impossible to believe that, if anything seriously offensive had occurred, Pius in the years following would have taken Rodrigo with him when returning to Siena. But he did, and without hesitation. And it is curious that, when the pope’s two letters came to light many years later, Rodrigo’s answer or answers were not found with them. It would have been customary for the letters from both correspondents to remain together in the archives. When one considers the extent to which various records came to be tampered with in order to blacken the Borgia legend—see About the Character of Alexander VI, this page—it is not far-fetched to wonder if whatever Rodrigo wrote in his own defense may have been intentionally destroyed.