The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  This episode merits such close examination because of the light the pope’s comments throw on the reputation of the clergy at this time and his high regard for Cardinal Rodrigo, and also because, as the only Borgia scandal of which there will be even a hint until many years later, it serves as a kind of prototype for the rough ways in which the reputations of Rodrigo and his kin will be handled through the centuries. For now, one further example must suffice. There has probably never been a detailed account of Rodrigo’s life that did not—quite understandably—include this description of him by a man who had once been his teacher, one Gaspar of Verona: “He is handsome, of a most glad countenance and joyous aspect, gifted with honeyed and choice eloquence. The beautiful women on whom his eyes are cast he lures to love him, and moves them in a wondrous way, more powerfully than the magnet influences iron.” Such a dazzling word-picture, rich not only in detail but in innuendo, merits repetition. But in the truncated form in which it usually appears it encourages rather lurid speculation. This renders inexcusable the omission, by one writer after another, of Gaspar’s concluding sentence: “But it is admitted, to be sure, that he sends them off untouched.”

  Gaspar’s description is typical of those left to us by people who knew Rodrigo. Without exception they emphasize the magnetism, the extraordinary vitality and appeal, of his person. Witnesses comment repeatedly on how multidimensional he was, and how fascinating to know. Physically he was imposing, tall and athletically built in his prime, and he carried himself with a dignity that must have been intimidating. But this simply added to the surprise of what he revealed in interacting with others: he turned out to be affable, accessible, kindly, and unfailingly charming. No one ever accused him of being less than a dutiful and hardworking vice-chancellor and cardinal. It has often been noted that he was never absent from consistories except when out of Rome or ill—which, thanks to his hardy constitution, he almost never was. But even when immersed in work he remained good-humored, even jovial. He was rather stolidly conservative in his religious beliefs—entirely comfortable with established dogma and no friend of theological or philosophical innovation—but he showed marked tolerance in dealing with those whose views were not as orthodox as his own, on one occasion making the lame joke that “the Lord requires not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may pay and live.” Late in his career, when the Jews were being expelled from Spain, Rodrigo would annoy Ferdinand and Isabella by making the refugees welcome in Rome.

  Throughout his life he seemed incapable of taking offense at even the most outrageous slanders, even when their source was a figure as incendiary as Friar Savonarola, whom we shall encounter later. His reputation has suffered permanently from his indifference to an anonymous pamphlet that appeared a few years before his death and declared him to be a “monster” and “an abyss of vice” under whose influence “the bestiality and savagery of Nero and Caligula are surpassed.” The ease with which he laughed such things off, brushing aside the complaints of relatives who urged him to forbid their circulation and punish the parties responsible, shows one of the most attractive sides of his personality. It has also, however, freed other writers to come to the unwarranted assumption that Rodrigo failed to defend himself because he knew his conduct to be indefensible. This encouraged further and more specific slanders—for example, the preposterous assertion of the Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini (who was still twenty-three years from being born when the Siena garden party took place) that Rodrigo was “mightily lustful of both sexes, publicly keeping boys and girls, but mostly girls.”

  All his life Rodrigo had an almost childish love of pomp, ceremony, and public splendor, and he agreed with the popes he served that it was part of a cardinal’s duty both to maintain the dignity of the college by maintaining a splendid front and to help make Rome the most magnificent city in the world. He could be reckless in his spending for such purposes. On Palm Sunday 1461, when all Rome turned out for the arrival of what was supposedly the long-lost head of the apostle Andrew, St. Peter’s brother, Rodrigo became the talk of the town by turning not only his own palace but its surroundings into a display of magnificent extravagance. Pius II in his Memoirs, after describing the contributions to the celebration by other cardinals and dignitaries, notes delightedly that “all were far outstripped in expense and effort and ingenuity by Rodrigo, the vice-chancellor. His huge towering house which he had built on the site of the ancient mint was covered with rich and wonderful tapestries, and besides this he had raised a lofty canopy from which were suspended many and various marvels. He had decorated not only his own house but those nearby, so that the square all about them seemed a kind of park full of sweet songs and sounds, or a great palace gleaming with gold such as they say Nero’s palace was.”

  If all this was wasteful, it had the ecstatic approval of the man to whom Rodrigo owed his position and his income. If it was foolish, it was also expected—practically required. If it was self-serving in the sense of enhancing Rodrigo’s prestige in an era when it was considered shameful for holders of high office not to indulge in ostentatious display, it also carries a note of generosity. Certainly it was not the mark of a greedy, still less a miserly, man. And behind these bursts of ostentation, Rodrigo lived simply, even abstemiously. It comes as a surprise to learn that associates regarded it as a misfortune to be a guest at his table. The fare was so plain, Ferrara’s ambassador reported, that “it is disagreeable to have to dine with him.” So much for bacchanalian feasts.

  The word that sums up Rodrigo Borgia is gusto. He loved life, enjoyed people, and found satisfaction even in the most challenging duties, but he was capable also of putting the cares of his work out of mind whenever time permitted. Zest would suit him also. And joie de vivre. The German Ludwig Pastor, who spent most of his life in Rome and wrote a forty-volume history of the papacy, observed that “nothing can be more false than the ordinary conception of Borgia as a morose and inhuman monster.” A twentieth-century historian, Michael Mallett, summed up the consensus of five hundred years in writing of how even people with reasons to dislike Rodrigo “were often reconciled by his friendliness and boisterous good humor.”

  To round out the picture it is worthwhile to return to Guicciardini, who hated what he knew or thought he knew of Rodrigo and went far beyond the bounds of fairness in attempting to sully his name. Even Guicciardini conceded that as vice-chancellor Rodrigo was “prudent, vigilant, and maturely reflective,” as well as exceptionally persuasive and effective in the management of difficult matters. Juxtaposed against how Rodrigo is usually depicted, even by Guicciardini himself, such words become rather baffling. It may have been bafflement that caused a more recent historian to throw up his hands at what he took to be Rodrigo’s “strange many-sidedness” and call him “an enigma to his contemporaries.” He was no such thing. People who knew him appear to have taken him at face value, and with few and explainable exceptions they liked what they saw.

  When Pope Pius finally consented to bid adieu to Siena, three years remained to his life. They would be consumed by two things that commonly come together: war and money trouble. There was a continuing war in Naples, where Ferrante, with the help of reinforcements sent by Pius, Milan, and Skanderbeg of Albania, was clawing his way back from the brink of ruin. As the rebellious barons and the Angevin invaders slowly ran out of fight and Ferrante’s situation became less dire, he was freed to reveal facets of his character that earlier had been concealed—except, perhaps, from those who knew him best, onetime intimates like Alonso Borgia. It was at about this time, according to stories from credible sources, that he created the prison-cum-museum in which the embalmed bodies of defeated foes were displayed alongside cages in which living captives were either starved to death or left to slowly go insane. As his political position became secure, Ferrante became nearly as powerful a force in Italian politics as his father Alfonso had been. It would become clear soon enough that he was also just as meddlesome.

  War went on in the Rom
agna too, where the rebellious warlord Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini was proving to be a maddeningly able soldier and impossible to bring to heel. But the conflict that was costing Pius the most, both financially and in emotional terms, was not a real but a hoped-for one. It was the fight he wanted to carry to the Ottoman Turks, the crusade he had pledged to launch in 1464 in spite of the failure of the congress of Mantua. It became the source of his, and then of Rodrigo’s, worst money troubles. The sending of envoys to every part of Europe on a fund-raising campaign proved a serious financial drain—the crowned heads would have been insulted if the pope’s men failed to arrive in grand style—and the returns were scarcely commensurate with the costs. Pius like Calixtus before him was meanwhile emptying the papal treasury to build galleys and hire crews. He found himself in such financial straits that he introduced a practice that would continue to have a corrosive effect on the Church long after his reign was over: he began selling positions in the Curia, the Vatican’s bureaucracy.

  Rodrigo was not merely feeling the pinch—he appears to have been going broke. He was doing so in spite of the fact that Pius, even more than his uncle Calixtus, rained benefices on him: bishoprics, abbeys, a share in the revenues generated by the sale of offices, sources of ecclesiastical income of almost every possible kind. Once again, it was a matter of his income being needed for the discharge of his responsibilities. At this time as much as at any in his life, that income was proving to be woefully inadequate for the purpose.

  Cumulatively, the demands on Rodrigo’s purse were of crushing weight. He was paying to construct the episcopal palace that he had “volunteered” to contribute to Pius’s remaking of Pienza, and to provide a fully equipped galley with crew for the pope’s crusade. (Such a warship was so costly that only the wealthiest entities in the Papal States—the city of Bologna, for example, and the duke of Ferrara—could possibly be asked to finance one.) He was also expected to contribute a troop of thirty armed men and ten horses to the pope’s war with Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, and it was taken for granted that as one of Rome’s most prominent cardinals he would maintain himself in a style worthy of a prince—a style involving the establishment and maintenance of a residence, a palace, that reflected glory on the Church and its capital. Beyond all this it was his responsibility to provide salaries, workplaces, and perhaps even accommodations for a good many of the men employed in the chancery and the Rota as well.

  While Calixtus was still alive, Rodrigo had purchased from the Vatican for two thousand florins a row of old buildings across the Tiber from St. Peter’s between the Piazza di Spagna and the bridge at the Castel Sant’Angelo. He then began converting these buildings, among them a derelict structure that once had housed the papal mint, into a suitably grand home with space for his subordinates and the conduct of the chancery’s business—a palace. This became yet another chronic and painful financial drain.

  It all proved to be too much. In 1462, unable to meet his obligations, Rodrigo offered to sell his unfinished palace back to the papal treasury, the camera, for the original purchase price plus what he had spent on improvements. But the camera too was insolvent. Rather than letting what had become the chancery’s headquarters go to a third party, Rodrigo mortgaged it. A year later he was still under such pressure financially that Pius granted him temporary permission to tax the beneficiaries of his diocese of Valencia—those clergymen receiving stipends as deans, canons, and the like. He was also allowed to sell at a discount, in return for an immediate infusion of cash, the next three years of his own revenues as Valencia’s bishop. We will see him resorting to similar expedients in decades to come even as he is supposedly amassing a fortune of almost inconceivable size.

  With the kings and high churchmen of all Europe reluctant to contribute more than token quantities of money and men, the pope’s dream of a crusade would have had to be abandoned except for an event so unexpected, indeed so utterly improbable, that Pius declared it a miracle. It was the discovery, on land belonging to the papacy in the wooded hills of Tolfa about sixty miles north of Rome, of huge deposits of high-quality alum—potassium aluminum sulfate, the same humble substance sold today in the form of styptic pencils to stop the bleeding from shaving cuts.

  Until some two hundred years ago, when a way of synthesizing it was discovered, alum was a quasi-precious substance with many uses, the most important involving the tanning of leather and the dyeing of wool and other fibers. Mines at the southern end of the Balkan peninsula had long been Europe’s only source, and after the Turks moved into the Balkans, it could be obtained only at extortionate prices. This came to an abrupt end in the spring of 1462, thanks to a onetime dyer named Giovanni di Castro, who had fled Constantinople when it fell to the Turks and become a minor official in the Papal States. One day, exploring the hills inland from Civitavecchia between Florence and Rome, Castro noticed the prevalence of a species of tree rarely seen in Italy but common around the alum mines of the Balkans. Investigating further, he made his great discovery. He hurried to Rome and in great excitement announced to the pope that “today I bring you victory over the Turk. Every year they wring from the Christians more than three hundred thousand ducats for the alum with which we dye wool … But I have found seven mountains so rich in this material that they could supply seven worlds … This mine will supply you with the sinews of war, money, and take them from the Turks.”

  About the value of what he had found, Castro was not exaggerating. In short order thousands of men were at work in new mines at Tolfa; they would remain in operation for three and a half centuries. The profits climbed rapidly toward a hundred thousand ducats per year. Pius decreed that all of it was to be spent to make war on the Turks.

  Thus it became possible for the crusade preparations to continue. The need remained obvious: a year after Castro’s discovery, Sultan Mehmed invaded Bosnia and conquered it with frightening ease, taking his empire another step closer to Vienna, to Italy, to the nerve centers of southeastern Europe. Even after this loss, however, Pius could find support in only two places. First in Venice, resigned at last to the inevitability of war with the Turks, and then among the common people of the north. Even in places where the leaders of church and state had no interest in sacrificing anything for the sake of a distant campaign—in Germany and the Low Countries, in France and Spain, and as far away as Scotland—ordinary people responded to the pope’s call. From pulpits across Europe, preachers dispatched from Rome were telling the faithful that all available men should prepare to report for duty in the summer of 1464. They should assemble in Venice, or better yet they should make their way farther down Italy’s east coast and join the pope at the port city of Ancona. There—so the plan went—they would be taken aboard a great fleet of mostly Venetian galleys for transportation to the East and the great showdown with Islam.

  It was a doomed enterprise, insufficiently funded and without political support. It was kept alive by little more than the pope’s refusal to admit that the obstacles were too great to be overcome. In September 1463, with his launch date now less than a year away, Pius called the cardinals together in a consistory at which he complained in angry, bitter terms that neither Europe’s leaders nor its people were rallying to the cause. He was right about the leaders and undoubtedly should have called the whole thing off, but he had become a man obsessed. In an act so deeply foolish that it can only have been intended to shame the crowned heads of Christendom, Pius announced that he was going to lead the crusade personally. He had already recruited the brilliant Skanderbeg to take charge of military operations; this new pledge to inject himself into the expedition in spite of his complete lack of military experience and indifferent health looks less like an effort to inspire than an outburst of spite and defiance.

  Nine months later, on June 18, 1464, Pius set out for Ancona and the fulfillment of his great dream. Some of Rome’s leading citizens, the memory of the disorders that had erupted during the pope’s previous long absence still fresh in thei
r minds, had objected with considerable heat when informed of his plans. To placate them he promised to leave the pontifical administration at home, its leadership intact. This removed any possibility that Cardinal Borgia, the central figure in that administration, might be expected to go with the pontiff to war. He did, however, set off to accompany the pope to Ancona. It was a brutally hot summer, and Pius, who had been feverish for some time, found himself capable of traveling only in short, slow stages with frequent stops for recuperation. Rodrigo caught up with him at Terni, and they pushed on together from there. They arrived at Ancona on July 19 to find it a boiling cauldron of confusion and pestilence, overrun with amateur crusaders from all parts of Europe. The town had no way to shelter so many visitors, too little food, even a desperate shortage of drinking water. There was no sign of the Venetian fleet, which was overdue, and as plague broke out, many of the volunteers who did not fall sick began to flee. The pope, too weak to leave his room overlooking the harbor, watched for the arrival of Venice’s galleys as his ragtag volunteer army melted away. By August 9 Rodrigo too was ill—which fact has given rise to another ridiculously insubstantial Borgia scandal.

  This one rises out of a letter written on August 10 by the marquess of Mantua’s ambassador to the papal court. He informs his master of Rodrigo’s sickness, adding that “the physician who saw him first says that he has little hope for him, principally because he had, shortly before, not slept alone in bed.” This has been interpreted as meaning that Rodrigo had been indulging in sexual adventures since arriving in Ancona and was dying as a result. But of course there never has been a venereal disease that kills or even incapacitates in a matter of days, and the most dangerous of such diseases, syphilis, is generally believed to have been unknown in Europe before Columbus’s return from his first voyage of discovery in 1493. As for the cardinal’s not sleeping alone, as recently as the nineteenth century it was not uncommon even for men of importance to share beds, and it may very well have been necessary for senior members of the pope’s entourage to do so in the grossly overcrowded conditions of Ancona that summer.