The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  Setting aside the obvious undesirability of allowing any single individual to be bishop of two or more cities (a practice that would not be ended until the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century), it was no proof of wickedness or indeed of simony. To the contrary, when not used as a way of capriciously enriching family and favorites, it could be not only practical but nearly unavoidable. The test, surely, is whether the incomes in question were used to good purpose or simply to indulge the recipient. Sixtus fails that test badly in some instances—grossly where his favorite nephews are concerned—but not in the case of Rodrigo Borgia. What happened in the two months following his appointment as legate indicates that, far from getting rich, Rodrigo was once again seriously short of funds. On January 17, 1472, Sixtus signed a bull permitting him to auction the income due from his benefices over the next three years. On March 6, with his departure for Spain only two months off, he was authorized to mortgage the revenues of the chancery as well. Such favors would never have been granted if Rodrigo had not requested them. Because their net result would be a significant reduction in his income over several years, he would not have asked if his need had not been serious.

  His arrival at Valencia on June 17 was treated as a great event, with the governor-general heading a reception committee of dignitaries and the walls of the city draped in crimson cloth. Rodrigo was a quadruply noteworthy guest of honor: Valencia’s absentee bishop, a cardinal, the pope’s personal representative, and a native son returning home in glory. As soon as the formalities had been completed and Rodrigo had delivered an address to the assembled clergy of his diocese, he moved up the coast to the Catalonian province of Tarragona. There he met for the first time King Juan of Aragon, the complexity of whose character is reflected in the fact that he was called by some Juan the Great, by others Juan the Faithless. Younger brother of the late Alfonso V, uncle of Ferrante of Naples, Juan was tough and ambitious, a ruthless political infighter. Having arrived at his court, Rodrigo was able to get down to the business that had brought him to Spain.

  At the top of his agenda, of course, was bringing the kingdom of Aragon and its satellites into an international coalition to fight the Turks. Juan, predictably uninspired by the idea, replied that he had far too many problems to do any such thing. He had a war on his hands, thanks to the refusal of the people of Catalonia to accept absorption into Aragon on his terms. At the time of Rodrigo’s arrival he had been besieging Barcelona for almost a year without result. What was at least as frustrating, his attempt to unite Aragon and Castile by marrying his son and heir Ferdinand to the king of Castile’s half-sister and supposed heir Isabella had gone so badly wrong that it was no longer certain that Isabella was in fact her brother’s heir—or that her marriage to Ferdinand was valid.

  Seeing that he had no chance of accomplishing the pope’s purposes unless Juan were somehow extracted from these difficulties, Rodrigo undertook to perform the extractions personally. He obtained the king’s permission to go to Barcelona and talk with the defenders, searching for terms on which the siege might be satisfactorily concluded. When he came away, it seemed that he had failed, that the Catalans were unwilling to compromise. But soon thereafter—whether because their situation inside the besieged city was becoming unsustainable, or because of the new options that Rodrigo had opened to them—the Catalans made themselves available for talks. Juan, accepting the cardinal’s counsel, responded in encouraging terms. The result was peace—a peace that had been inaccessible until Rodrigo’s intervention. No account of how he accomplished this exists, but the engaging frankness that he brought to all his relationships—the openness and candor with which, for example, he had responded when Cardinal Piccolomini challenged his decision to vote for Estouteville in 1458—must surely have been a factor. As we shall see, his life story is studded with instances in which his ability to connect even with adversaries affected the course of history. Barcelona accepted Aragonese rule, and in keeping with Rodrigo’s proposal its defenders were granted a general pardon. Juan pledged to uphold the Catalan constitution, and the city’s French commandant was allowed to depart unharmed. Problem solved.

  Next, Rodrigo used the authority given him by Sixtus to dispense Ferdinand and Isabella from the canon law that prohibited the marriage of near relations. (The two were cousins in multiple ways, thanks to numerous intermarriages among the royal families of Aragon, Castile, and Portugal.) He thereby validated the marriage that they had entered into three years earlier, when Ferdinand was seventeen and Isabella a year older. Another problem solved.

  This left the question of whether Isabella was in fact heir to the throne of Castile, so that her marriage could serve its intended purpose of uniting that kingdom with Aragon. Rodrigo moved on to Castile and to the Madrid court of King Enrique IV. There he found a kind of low-grade war in process between nobles demanding that Isabella be recognized as heir and those supporting the claim of the king’s supposed daughter, Juana. This struggle was fueled by the widespread suspicion that Juana was not Enrique’s daughter at all and therefore not entitled to inherit. Her enemies, and Enrique’s, referred to her as La Beltraneja, a jibe reflecting the belief that she was the product of an adulterous affair between Enrique’s queen and one Beltrán de la Cueva, duke of Albuquerque. Rodrigo found it surprisingly easy to persuade Enrique to repudiate the princess he had always acknowledged as his daughter. The Castilian king, as weak as his sobriquet “Enrique the Impotent” suggested, was willing to acknowledge Isabella as heir in return for nothing more costly than the promotion of his favorite bishop to the Sacred College. Rodrigo arranged that, when in 1473 Pope Sixtus appointed a slate of new cardinals, the list would include Enrique’s favorite. Delighted as he was, Enrique cannot have been more pleased than Juan of Aragon and his son and daughter-in-law.

  Before departing Castile, Rodrigo summoned the bishops of Castile and León to meet with him in Segovia. There he launched a program of reform that would, among other things, make Spain the home of some of Europe’s first diocesan seminaries, ending the ordination of priests who knew nothing of Latin or theology. The time that Rodrigo devoted to Church business while in Spain—his instituting of reforms at a number of monasteries being another example—is not easily reconciled with claims that throughout his career he was cynically indifferent to the proper functioning of the Church.

  By midsummer 1473 he had been in Spain for more than a year. He had won assurances of royal support for the war against the Turks, and though that support seemed certain to be modest, there was no prospect that by remaining longer he could achieve more. Meanwhile he was receiving troubling reports about developments back in Rome. The most alarming were being sent by Cardinal Jacopo Ammannati-Piccolomini, bishop of Pavia, an adoptive member of the late Pius II’s family and one of the Pieschi who had been too opposed to Cardinal della Rovere to allow a declaration of unanimous election. He begged Rodrigo to hurry back to Rome to help counteract the influence of Pope Sixtus’s nephews. There is irony in his appeals, because at this same time he was writing to others in ways that have contributed to blackening the Borgia name. Having earlier accused Rodrigo of securing Sixtus’s election through “cunning and bribery,” he was now complaining—from Rome, it must be noted—that Rodrigo’s conduct in Spain was “vain, luxurious, ambitious, [and] greedy.” The sad truth appears to be that Ammannati, in many ways an admirable individual, was bitter about the election of Sixtus, about not having been among the legates chosen in December 1471, and about finding himself—not surprisingly, all this considered—out of favor at the papal court. He heaped scorn not only on Rodrigo but on the other legates as well, even the venerable Bessarion, and could be absurdly reckless in his accusations. The credibility of the things he wrote can be measured by his complaint that while in Portugal Rodrigo spent “most of his time with the ladies.” In fact, there is no evidence that Rodrigo ever set foot in Portugal. Nor is it irrelevant that while spreading such slanders Ammannati was imploring their object to return to
the Vatican to help counteract what was happening there. If it is not impossible that he would turn to a man he regarded as seriously corrupt for help in fighting corruption, it certainly is odd.

  From Segovia Rodrigo returned to Madrid, then to Valencia, where he spent time with King Juan’s clever son Ferdinand, planting the seeds of what would grow into a long-lasting friendship. Early in August he at last paid a visit to his boyhood home, Játiva, where he was received as a hero, next to his uncle Alonso the greatest personage the town had ever produced. His entourage was joined by a contingent of Spanish dignitaries wanting to accompany him back to Rome, and in September they put to sea in a pair of Venetian galleys. On October 10, almost home, they were caught in a storm off the Italian coast near Pisa. In the course of a terrifying night one of the galleys went down with the loss of approximately two hundred passengers and crew. Among them were seventy-five members of Rodrigo’s retinue (the number suggests just how expensive the mission had been), three Spanish bishops, and property and gold (the cardinal’s personal baggage included) with a value of at least thirty thousand ducats. Rodrigo survived thanks to the skill of his vessel’s captain, who saved all hands by intentionally running aground on a sandy beach.

  Though Sixtus must have hoped that Rodrigo would return with more support for his crusade than he was able to—and though some of what he had obtained may have gone to the bottom of the sea with the doomed galley—the mission had accomplished great things all the same. The cardinal received a deservedly warm welcome and learned that he had been the most successful of the legates in terms of mustering resources for the war against the Turks. Bessarion had died after being rebuffed by wily old Louis XI of France. Capranica was in poor health after failing to persuade many of the princes of Italy to join the cause, and the jealousies of the eastern European monarchs had made it impossible for Marco Barbo to accomplish anything. Cardinal Carafa had taken a combined force of papal, Venetian, and Neapolitan galleys into the eastern Mediterranean and had had some early success, including the burning of the Ottoman port of Smyrna. But his fleet had then disintegrated as the Neapolitans and Venetians fell to quarreling and sailed off to their respective homes.

  Rodrigo, by contrast, had resolved disputes that had long plagued the Iberian church and launched important reforms. He had shown the way to peace in Aragon and in Castile and had helped lay the foundations for eventual unification of the two kingdoms. No less important was the respect and gratitude of the Spanish royals. A few years later, when Isabella gave birth to a son and heir, she and Ferdinand would ask Rodrigo to serve as godfather. This was but a token of the friendship that would bind the houses of Borgia and Trastámara for the next quarter-century, becoming a factor of real significance in the politics not only of Italy but of Europe.

  As he took up once again the management of the chancery, Rodrigo saw that Ammannati had not been exaggerating when he wrote of trouble in Rome. The situation was, if anything, more disturbing than the cardinal had warned. The balance of power on which the peace of Italy depended, always fragile and frequently violated, was in danger of falling apart completely. The reasons were numerous and complex, but few were more important than the far-reaching fear and resentment now being aroused by the pope’s lavishing of favors on his relatives. Acceptance of papal nepotism had limits even in Rome, and its beneficiaries were expected to conduct themselves with a measure of restraint, at least early in a reign. Sixtus, however, was conducting himself as though the limits did not exist, his nephews as though restraint was contemptible. They had been feeding ravenously at the pontifical trough almost from the day of their uncle’s election, they gave no sign of being satisfied, and indignation was rising to a level not seen in many generations.

  The eldest of the cardinal-nephews, the explosively temperamental Giuliano della Rovere, was, though not yet thirty, archbishop of both Avignon and Bologna, bishop of five dioceses, and abbot of two major monasteries. His cousin Girolamo Riario, not so long ago a small-town fruit peddler but now a member of the titled nobility, was papal enforcer in his role as captain-general of the Vatican soldiery and clearly set on rising higher. But even they were eclipsed by their uncle’s great favorite, Girolamo’s younger brother Cardinal Pietro Riario. Intelligent and cultivated where Girolamo was a Caliban-like bundle of mindless animal energy, Pietro was so loved by Sixtus that the rumor mill declared them to be father and son. Gossip of this kind is understandable, was probably inevitable, and certainly was not uncommon in such circumstances. In the absence of evidence, it can only be noted with interest—and an appropriate measure of skepticism.

  Pietro, the pope’s most trusted adviser especially but not only where questions of foreign policy were involved, had become the recipient of an avalanche of nepotistic largesse. He was archbishop of Florence as well as bishop of a handful of cities and head of the great abbey of Saint Ambrose in Milan, and he bore the honorary title of patriarch of Constantinople. His income was stupendous—estimated at between sixty and seventy thousand florins per year—but so inadequate to his way of life that he was piling up debts at a rate that should have alarmed Sixtus. He brought the finest artists to Rome and put them to work on an immense new palace, spent without restraint on everything from racehorses to pearl-covered gowns for his mistresses, and was accompanied on his rounds by five hundred attendants all dressed in scarlet silk.

  Italy had rarely seen anything to compare with the arrogance and presumption of these upstarts from the hinterlands, and trouble was inevitable. It began in the spring of 1473—Rodrigo was still in Spain—with a clash over territory between Sixtus and a much younger man of equally strong will, Lorenzo de’ Medici of Florence. In his fourth year as de facto chief of the Florentine republic in spite of being only twenty-four, Lorenzo was well along in his development into the fabled Lorenzo the Magnificent, one of the supreme personalities of the Renaissance. It is difficult to say whether he or Sixtus was most responsible for their conflict. Lorenzo made the first move, entering into an agreement by which Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan was to sell the town of Imola to Florence for a hundred thousand florins. Imola was far from being one of the great urban centers of Italy, but it lay just north and east of the Apennine Mountains and commanded miles of the rich flatlands of the Romagna. It also sat athwart the old Roman highway called the Via Emilia, a lifeline that helped to connect Florence to the Adriatic and the markets of the East. Thus it had a strategic importance out of proportion to its size.

  Like the whole of the Romagna Imola owed fealty to Rome, but like much other papal territory it had long ago slipped out of papal control. It was one of the jumble of petty city-states ruled by clans that at best paid lip service to Rome while ruthlessly exploiting their subjects. Sixtus like Paul II had entered upon his reign determined to reestablish control of as much of the Papal States as possible, and again like Paul he gave particular attention to the Romagna. There were good reasons for this: the fertility of its soil made the Romagna an agricultural cornucopia, and many of the region’s warlords had no legitimate claim to the towns they ruled and no grounds for complaint if displaced. It had become a centerpiece of papal policy to displace them if possible, and therefore Imola was at least as important to Rome as to Florence. The sale arranged by Lorenzo de’ Medici was as unthinkable for the pope as control of the city by Rome—or by any state except Florence—was for the Florentines.

  When Sixtus ordered Milan’s Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza to cancel the sale on grounds that he had no right to sell what he did not own even if his troops happened to occupy it, what followed was not obedience but prolonged, multisided, and indescribably complicated negotiations. These ended in a new agreement, this one between Milan and Rome with Florence relegated to the sidelines. Imola was to be handed over not to Florence but to the pope, and for forty thousand florins rather than a hundred. Seller and buyer were to be brought together in harmony via the marriage (which had long been under discussion) of Count Girolamo Riario to Galeazzo Maria�
�s illegitimate daughter Caterina, now all of eleven years old. Such a marriage had become advantageous in a new way: it would allow all parties to pretend that Imola was not being sold at all but was the dowry of the bride-to-be. Florence, neither fooled nor mollified, was soon in an uproar of indignation.

  The Vatican treasury did not have forty thousand florins to spare. The Roman branch of the Medici bank having had a monopoly on the papacy’s business since a grateful client became Pope Nicholas V back in 1447, Sixtus found himself applying for a loan to none other than Lorenzo de’ Medici. If he was less than shocked at being turned down, he definitely was infuriated. He broke off relations with the House of Medici and put in its place a rival Florentine establishment, the bank of Francesco de’ Pazzi.

  That might have been the end of it, but was only the beginning. When Sixtus sent envoys to assert his authority in the Romagna, hostile local warlords forced them to turn back. The pope then raised the stakes, sending an armed force northward under his nephew Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. The compulsive determination to dominate everyone and everything, to impose his will upon every situation and accept no setbacks, made Giuliano a throwback to the ferocious warrior-cardinals of the past. He was also an abler soldier than his cousin Girolamo, the papal captain-general, because he was more intelligent and courageous. He was thwarted all the same, forced into retreat by a superior Florentine force. Predictably, and with considerable justification, Sixtus again seethed with indignation. Eventually, after considerable to-ing and fro-ing, the pope’s troops succeeded in reaching Imola, and Girolamo Riario was installed as its lord.