The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  The most notorious and in his way the greatest of the Malatesta was born in 1417 and grew up to become the plague of popes and kings. This was Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, tall and powerfully built, blue-eyed and golden-haired, with the moral code of a sociopath. He first went soldiering at age thirteen, a year later took command of Rimini’s defenses and fought off an attack by some Malatesta cousins, and succeeded to the lordship of the city one year after that. He was intelligent, a poet, a patron of artists and architects, so talented a general as to be described by some as a military genius. He was also so unscrupulous, so hungry for conquest, that finally no one could trust him. The stories told about him defy belief; he was said to have murdered two wives, copulated with his daughters, and been stopped at knifepoint from raping his son. The worst of these tales are almost certainly fabrications—Pope Pius II, who hated him as he hated no one else on earth, was the source of many of the most hair-raising of them—but it is nonetheless certain that he was capable of atrocious acts. The same cousins whom he had bested at Rimini at age fourteen later became so terrified of him that to escape his wrath they sold their home city of Pesaro to the duke of Milan.

  The assortment of enemies that Sigismondo accumulated would have caused most men to reconsider their conduct, but he was fearless quite literally to a fault. Among those who sought his destruction were Alfonso V of Aragon and then his son Ferrante, Pope Pius II and then his successor, Paul. What would ultimately matter more, Federico da Montefeltro, a general who was an even better soldier than he and a far cooler head, came to hate him bitterly. Montefeltro’s home city of Urbino was not distant from Malatesta’s Rimini, which meant that, both men being ambitious to expand their domains, they were fated to collide. Things first turned seriously ugly in the late 1450s, when the two became embroiled in a dispute over the towns of Mondavio in the March of Ancona and Senigallia on the Romagna coast. Pope Pius was invited to arbitrate, but his decision left Malatesta convinced that he had been cheated. His response was to seize Mondavio and lay siege to Senigallia, thus putting himself at war with Rome and drawing down upon himself charges of heresy and treason.

  In July 1462 Malatesta met a superior papal force at Castel Leone and subjected it to such a humiliating defeat that he expected Pius to come to terms. But the pope was unwilling to give up. Instead he again hired Montefeltro, who had not been present at Castel Leone, and in one of the weirdest exercises in the history of the papacy had Malatesta burned in effigy and canonized in reverse as a damned soul. (“I am Sigismondo Malatesta, king of traitors,” a sign on the blazing dummy said. “Enemy of God and man, by sentence of the Sacred College condemned to the flames.”) In short order Montefeltro and Malatesta had their showdown, and the latter was defeated so thoroughly that the war was over.

  Pius wanted to drive the now-helpless Malatesta out of his last remaining stronghold, Rimini, and take possession of it himself. But Milan and Venice intervened, declaring that they could not tolerate the establishment of a papal outpost so far north. Malatesta had to pay a hefty annual tribute and pledge to fast on bread and water every Friday for the rest of his life. He lost almost all of his territories but was allowed to keep Rimini and a bit of the adjacent countryside for as long as he lived. His brother Domenico remained lord of Cesena on the same terms. Satisfied, Pius lifted the three bulls of excommunication earlier laid on Sigismondo and approved his departure for Greece, where he became a commander of Venetian forces in the war against the Turks.

  The Malatesta, it appeared, were finished. This seemed all the more certain when, in 1465, Domenico died without an heir and the lordship of Cesena became vacant. Paul II, just a year into his papacy, moved quickly to take possession. Under ordinary circumstances such a step would have been opposed by the leading powers of the north, all of which coveted the Romagna and none of which wanted to see Rome entrench itself in the region. But Paul was lucky in his timing. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was in no position to do anything, obviously. Florence was distracted by upheavals following the death of its leader Cosimo de’ Medici; Milan’s Duke Francesco Sforza was incapacitated by dropsy and gout; and the Venetians, locked in their war with the Turks, were unwilling to risk offending their ally the pope. In short order Cesena’s government was in the hands of a legate from Rome, and it had all been accomplished without bloodshed.

  Three years later, when Sigismondo died in Rimini (he had returned from Greece sometime earlier and shortly before his death had visited Rome with the apparent intention of murdering Paul II), the pope made ready to repeat his success at Cesena. But his luck had run out. Sigismondo had left two sons, the legitimate Sallustio and the bastard Roberto, who promptly showed himself to be a true Malatesta by murdering his half-brother (he probably killed Sigismondo’s widow as well) and declaring himself lord. When the pope laid claim to the city, he was met with defiance. Roberto immediately received pledges of support from Ferrante of Naples, the Sforzas of Milan, and finally even Venice, which could see nothing good in allowing even a Venetian pope to acquire a foothold on the north Adriatic coast.

  Paul preferred to avoid war even when he had the advantage, and the opposition now facing him would have made going to war an act of political suicide. And so he tried diplomacy, and the great ever-turning wheel of alliances made and alliances broken began to spin as dizzyingly as only Italy could spin it. When it came to rest in the summer of 1469, another general war was getting under way, Rome and Venice were once again allies, and on the other side were Naples, Milan, and Florence. This was the weirdest war yet, constantly throwing up surprises. Montefeltro took Rimini from Roberto Malatesta, decided to keep it for himself rather than handing it over to the papacy, then changed course again by doing what no one could possibly have imagined him doing. He switched sides and joined forces with Roberto Malatesta. Sudden and baffling changes of allegiance were common in fifteenth-century Italy, as we have seen and will see many times more, but this one seemed to come out of nowhere. That Montefeltro would come to the rescue of the son of the one man he had hated all his life was crazily improbable even by the standards of the time.

  It all ended in calamity for the pope. An army jointly commanded by Montefeltro and young Malatesta went out in search of their Roman and Venetian adversaries, found them, and inflicted on them a defeat so total that Paul gave up all thought of taking Rimini. The Malatesta were back, stronger than ever, and Roberto marked his triumph by marrying one of Montefeltro’s numerous daughters. The pope could only lick his wounds, perhaps consoling himself with the thought that he was not the first pope to have failed ignominiously in the Romagna and was not likely to be the last.

  9

  Sixtus IV: Disturbing the Peace

  None of the cardinals who voted for Francesco della Rovere in August 1471 could possibly have imagined, never mind expected, the torrent of blood and grief that, as Pope Sixtus IV, he was going to bring down on Italy in the course of a thirteen-year reign.

  Rodrigo Borgia was one of those cardinals—he played a conspicuous part in rounding up the votes needed for della Rovere’s election, actually—and there is no reason to think that his motives were any different from those of his colleagues. What they wanted, most of them, was a pope who would put an end to the turmoil of Paul II’s last years.

  Della Rovere seemed a perfect choice: a man unlikely to stir up trouble and likely to do good instead. A native of Liguria, the tiny province that is now the Italian Riviera but five centuries ago was a place of little consequence, in his fifty-seven years he had risen high from extraordinarily humble beginnings, managing while doing so to give offense to virtually no one. He was the son of a poor fisherman and at an early age had entered the Franciscan order of mendicant or begging friars—hardly a promising path to the highest levels of the Church. He proved to be academically gifted, however, and emerged from years of study and deep poverty as a professor of theology and philosophy, a respected author, and one of the leading members of his order. His promotion to card
inal was characteristic of what was best about Paul II. It was done not for any political purpose, or as compensation for any favors rendered, but in recognition of merit.

  His election as pope came about in the same way. The conclave of 1471 is often described as a conflict between two hostile parties, one made up chiefly of men named to the Sacred College by Paul (the Paoleschi), the other of Pius II’s appointees (the Pieschi). This way of explaining what happened, however, turns out to have limited value. The opening of the conclave found eighteen cardinals present; the fact that only three of them were not Italian meant that for the first time in more than two centuries the Italians had an opportunity—if they were united, which inevitably they were not—to elect one of their own without outside help. In any case the Italians were going to elect the pope, and it was almost inevitable that their choice would be Italian. When the conclave’s first ballot produced a result that was curious under the circumstances, giving the lead to the Greek Bessarion and that tireless self-promoter Estouteville of France, the obvious explanation was that almost no one present was ready to show his hand.

  This was certainly true of Rodrigo. He gave his first-round vote to Bartolomeo Roverella, the archbishop of Ravenna, a respectable enough choice but with no possibility of being elected. This was a delaying tactic, a way of concealing his intentions while waiting for the other cardinals to reveal theirs. Having cast it, he began lobbying actively for della Rovere, who on the third day received thirteen votes—five Paoleschi and three Pieschi among them—and so became pope. It is not clear why four cardinals—three Pieschi but also a solitary Paoleschi—refused to give della Rovere their votes even after his election became a certainty, thereby making it impossible to tell the world that the election had been unanimous. Perhaps those four knew della Rovere better than their colleagues.

  Della Rovere’s supporters knew that their choice was intelligent, immensely learned, and pious, and as Pope Sixtus IV he continued to be all those things. He showed himself to be other things as well. He quickly revealed not only a previously unsuspected toughness but a ruthlessness that could turn under pressure into outright brutality. Also completely unsuspected, and equally troubling when it manifested itself, was a devotion to his family that went almost beyond the bounds of reason. At the time of his election, most of that family was living in modest circumstances, even in near poverty, back in Liguria. With the stunning news that their kinsman had become pope, they descended upon Rome in a swarm, hoping to transform their lives. Not many were disappointed. Within a month of his election, Sixtus was dispensing favors to his relatives with a profligacy rarely if ever equaled in papal history.

  Among his brother Raffaelo’s offspring were three sons in their twenties: Giuliano, who thanks to his uncle the cardinal’s patronage was already bishop of a diocese in France; Bartolomeo, who had followed the future pope into the Franciscans; and Giovanni, a layman in search of a career. In short order the brilliant, hot-tempered, and blazingly ambitious Giuliano was made a cardinal. A place was found for Giovanni in the service of the best soldier in Italy, Federico da Montefeltro, and he was also appointed vicar, governor, of the papal town of Senigallia on the Adriatic coast. Friar Bartolomeo, for whatever reason, had to wait to be given a bishopric, but the wait took barely a year. The father of this trio found himself vaulted from the obscure penury of his old life into eminence as senator of Rome.

  Sixtus also had sisters, two of whom produced offspring destined to figure in the Borgia story. One of Luchina Basso’s five sons became a cardinal while all of his brothers were raised to the nobility, but none of them would be nearly as important as two of Bianca’s sons, the Franciscan friar Pietro Riario and his brother Girolamo. Their father, Paolo Riario, had been generous when his brother-in-law was a penniless young student, which may explain why Sixtus singled out the Riarii for special treatment. He gave the twenty-five-year-old Pietro the revenues of a rich abbey in northern Europe and appointed him to the College of Cardinals simultaneously with his cousin Giuliano della Rovere. Girolamo was a carefree young ruffian who in adolescence, after declining to take advantage of the educational opportunities made available by his uncle, had supported himself by selling oranges and raisins in the streets of his hometown. When his uncle was elected pope, he joined the southward stampede to Rome, and even he—arrogant lout that he was—must have been surprised by what happened next. He found himself captain-general of the papal army, a position for which he had no qualifications, and ennobled as count of Bosco. He was also put forward as a bridegroom for an illegitimate daughter of the duke of Milan, but as the girl was only eight a wedding was not yet possible.

  What would have been most apparent to the senior members of the Sacred College, in the early going, was not Sixtus’s nepotism but his gratifying willingness to do as they had hoped, first by ending the conflicts to which Paul II’s assertiveness had given rise, then by succeeding where his predecessors had failed in mounting a campaign against the Turks. These goals the cardinals approved heartily, of course, and the pope so intertwined the things he did to achieve them with the advancement of his family’s interests that the former tended to camouflage the latter. His success in marrying one of the least impressive of his nephews to a princess (albeit an illegitimate princess) of Naples’s royal family was an astonishing coup for the arrivistes from Liguria, but it was no less plausibly explained as a necessary step in dissolving the ill feeling that remained from Pope Paul’s reign. The marriage of another young della Rovere into the ducal family of Urbino, and the opening of negotiations over a possible union of the onetime fruit vendor Girolamo Riario with a Sforza of Milan, also had multilayered ramifications. Such unions raised the pope’s family to a level that until recently would have been unimaginable, but their possible political value for the Church transcended even this and made criticism difficult.

  Sixtus was businesslike in setting out to organize a pan-European counteroffensive against the Turks. Instead of doing the usual thing and announcing an international conference to be held in some city in or near the Alps, hoping that at least some of the powers would show up, he arranged to carry his appeal into every major capital in Europe. He announced the appointment of five cardinals who, armed with the powers of legates, were to fan out across the continent to enlist support. His choices for this assignment showed the seriousness with which he approached the challenge: able and respected men, each particularly well suited to the part of the world for which he was given responsibility. The aging and revered Bessarion was dispatched to Louis XI of France, Edward IV of England, and Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Cardinal Marco Barbo, the son of a brother of Paul II, was sent to central Europe: to Germany and the two short-lived kingdoms of Hungary-Bohemia-Croatia and Poland-Lithuania. The veteran diplomat Angelo Capranica got the thankless job of making the rounds of all the Italian principalities north of Naples and persuading them to put aside their endless quarrels and join the pope’s crusade. Naples was assigned to Oliviero Carafa, who was the son of a noble Neapolitan family and had managed through his career to stay on good terms with the devious Ferrante. Upon winning Ferrante over, Carafa was to add the Neapolitan triremes to the papal fleet and set off for Ottoman waters.

  The selection of Rodrigo Borgia as legate in the Iberian peninsula was all but inevitable. He was now the only Spanish cardinal in Rome—the only Spanish cardinal alive, aside from his cousin Luis Juan del Milà, who had long since withdrawn to his diocese of Lérida and was never seen in Italy—and was also the obvious choice by virtue of the pope’s high regard. Not only in this instance but throughout his reign, Sixtus would rely heavily on Rodrigo as vice-chancellor and turn to him when needing help in areas unrelated to work of the chancery. There would be no assignment more daunting than the one he now took on, because the prospects of finding substantial support for a crusade were even worse in Iberia than in the rest of Europe. What would eventually become the kingdom of Spain did not yet exist. Granada in the south remained a Muslim emi
rate and an outpost of Islamic North Africa, and though the peninsula’s Christian regions were no longer as politically fragmented as they once had been, they were still divided into the four kingdoms of Aragon, Castile, Portugal, and Navarre. Aragon and Castile were both ruled by branches of the House of Trastámara, but this did not keep them from being recurrently at odds.

  In returning to the land of his birth Rodrigo would be stepping into a tangle of dynastic and ecclesiastical disputes, all of them involving dangerous questions of money and power. It is a measure of the pope’s confidence that, rather than cautioning Rodrigo to limit himself to the proposed war on the Turks and keep clear of other, thornier issues, he empowered him to deal with almost anything he might encounter in whatever way he thought best. He was granted authority to dispense papal indulgences in return for support of the crusade, pardon crimes other than murder, settle property disputes, impose a special tithe on the incomes of Spanish clerics, and even offer appointments to the College of Cardinals. Later, when these powers appeared to be insufficient for dealing with the problems Rodrigo encountered, Sixtus would send out new bulls granting him still more. Among them was authority to excommunicate, though there is no evidence that Rodrigo ever used it.

  Such a high-level diplomatic mission involved transporting all the people and matériel required for a grand display of ecclesiastical splendor. It was therefore vastly expensive, which brings us back to the subject of Cardinal Borgia’s finances. When Pope Sixtus, upon taking office, followed the established practice of distributing the benefices he had held at the time of his election, he triggered as usual a game of musical chairs: many of the cardinals had to surrender offices they already possessed in order to accept others. Rodrigo was given the rich abbey of Subiaco near Tivoli and the bishopric of Albano in central Italy. Finally and more remarkably, a papal bull dispensed him from having to give up the see of Valencia or any of the other benefices bestowed on him by earlier popes.