The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  Girolamo’s brother Pietro, meanwhile, was occupied with other matters. Still in Milan and on the friendliest of terms with its murderous duke—it was partly because of their friendship that the duke had elected to sell Imola to the pope rather than to Florence—the cardinal and his host were engaged now in hatching a breathtakingly bizarre scheme that if somehow carried to completion might have satisfied the voracious ambitions of both men. Galeazzo Maria was to become king of Lombardy, his coronation performed by the pope. He would then advance on Rome and use his army to install Pietro on the papal throne. (Sixtus would be willing, one must assume, to abdicate in his nephew’s favor to make this possible.) That these things could ever have been accomplished is extremely unlikely; the forces in opposition would have been daunting. In any case the question was never put to the test. Upon returning to Rome, presumably to finalize arrangements with his uncle, Pietro was struck down by fever. In January 1474, after weeks of struggle and amid the usual rumors of poisoning, he died aged twenty-eight. Whether or to what extent Sixtus knew of Pietro’s plan and the part he was expected to play in it remains a mystery.

  Pietro’s death left his uncle bereft and a vacuum at the heart of the papal court. With all his excesses the young cardinal had been a comfort to Sixtus, a source of pride and even, at times, of helpful counsel. No greater question faced the pontiff, now in the third year of his reign, than where to look for a new right hand.

  There were several satisfactory answers, both in the College of Cardinals and elsewhere.

  Sixtus would choose badly.

  Background

  WAR, ITALIAN STYLE

  TO BE A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY POPE WAS TO BE FACED WITH A humiliating and costly form of political impotence: the inability to establish even limited control over those whole provinces of Italy that by law and tradition were the property of the papacy but in fact were in other, rarely friendly, hands.

  The resulting conflicts and frustrations are a dark thread running through the reigns of all the century’s popes. Time after time succeeding pontiffs found themselves blocked from their own territories by even the pettiest of lordlings, especially when, as commonly happened, those lordlings were under the protection of more powerful neighbors. We saw this in the reign of Paul II, who was able to take control of his fiefdom of Cesena only because its reigning strongman had died without an heir and the other interested powers were momentarily distracted. We saw also that only the help of Federico da Montefeltro enabled Paul to drive the vicious Anguillara clan from the little domain they had carved out of the Papal States, and that when this same Montefeltro changed sides (in spite of being himself a papal vassal), the pope was rendered helpless.

  It was much the same for Sixtus IV, who would never have been able to obtain Imola for his nephew Girolamo if the duke of Milan had not been willing to sell it. What had been given to the popes by emperors was taken from them by gangsters during the years of exile and schism, and after the papacy returned to Rome, those families proved impossible to control and all but impossible to uproot.

  To understand the Borgia story it is necessary to understand who these families were, and how they had come to matter as much as they did. Most of them were, by the time the first Borgias arrived in Rome, members of a brotherhood called the condottieri, which means simply that they signed contracts, condotta, to sell their military services in return for hard cash: for gold.

  It is appropriate, if less romantic, to call them warlords. Most were lords in a quite literal sense—the rulers, even when they did not bear titles of nobility, of one or more cities or towns. In most cases their rule was brutish and tyrannical, with no basis in law or justice. They spent their lives fighting one another, waging war for pay, or collecting retainers while waiting for the call to battle.

  It could be a lucrative line of work, being a condottiere, and it was not necessarily all that dangerous. A good condotta was a thing to be coveted, so fine a source of honor and income that by the fifteenth century breaking into the business had come to be nearly impossible for anyone lacking the right family connections. For anyone not born, that is, into the increasingly exclusive circle of Italian tyrant families.

  The world of these families was Italy’s version of the phenomenon that historians refer to as “bastard feudalism.” In its unadulterated form, feudalism was an arrangement by which a king granted land to his nobles, the nobles in turn parceled out their land among knights, and the knights used peasants to farm the parcels. Everyone at every level of this pyramid owed service to whoever stood directly above him and ultimately to the man at the apex, the prince. Part of the price for possession of land, and for protection, was an obligation to report for military service when summoned. This was the only dependable way of raising an armed force where not much money was in circulation. But it became a nuisance to everyone involved as economic life became more sophisticated. Gradually it mutated into the debased form that permitted noblemen, rather than fighting the king’s wars themselves, to send the king a purseful of gold instead.

  Things developed differently in Italy. As we saw earlier, feudalism failed to sink its roots as deeply south of the Alps as in the north, and it began to fade away earlier. The development of manufacturing and trade, the emergence of lively urban centers, and the absence of even a vestige of national government combined to create more opportunities for the freelance fighting man in Italy than elsewhere, and in ways that few ordinary Italians could have welcomed. When German kings began to invade the sunny lands of the south, they did so at the head of armies that seemed to the onlooking locals (no doubt accurately enough) to be not much of an improvement over the barbarian tribes that had overrun their forebears a thousand years before.

  Inevitably, amid the disorder created by these invasions, troops of battle-hardened foreigners found themselves at loose ends but unwilling to return to the cold and backward north when the emperors who had brought them to Italy were obliged to go home. Armed and unemployed in a rich and fragmented country, they rather naturally took up the business of pillaging. They came together to form companies that sometimes numbered more than ten thousand men, enough to make them a threat to the largest city-states. By electing their officers and providing opportunities for quick wealth that would have been inconceivable in any other line of work, they achieved surprisingly high levels of cohesion. Of course they left devastation behind them wherever they went. Their opportunism and ruthlessness are illustrated by an episode of 1329, when a force of eight hundred German cavalry deserted from the army of Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria and independently laid siege to the city of Lucca. The man sent by the emperor to order them to return defected himself instead and was rewarded with election as their leader. Upon capturing Lucca they looted it of everything of value, and then sold it to Genoa for thirty thousand florins.

  One of the most notorious early captains, Werner von Urslingen, is said to have displayed on his breastplate the motto “Enemy of God, of pity, and of mercy”—and to have earned it in years of savagely pillaging the Romagna, Tuscany, and Umbria. For a while he sold the services of the force he had created, the notorious Great Company, to the pope. When that proved insufficiently lucrative, he switched to ravaging the Papal States.

  Another fourteenth-century legend, Ezzelino da Romano (of German extraction despite his name), became so notorious for his atrocities that, two and a half centuries after his death, the poet Ariosto wrote that he was “believed to be the son of a demon.” He was not devoid of redeeming qualities, however. He was the only commander to remain loyal to Frederick II as that extraordinary emperor was brought low by the pope, and he was generous in his treatment of vanquished foes. It appears likely that the most horrifying of the stories he inspired—accounts of his monstrous treatment of children, for example—were invented by his enemies. The moral caliber of those enemies, and the standards of conduct prevailing at the time, might fairly be measured by what happened after Ezzelino was captured and subjected to a slow, agonizing d
eath. His brother and partner Alberico, also captured, was forced to watch as his wife and two daughters were burned alive. All six of his sons were then executed, their bodies chopped into pieces and scattered. Finally, ropes were tied to Alberico’s extremities and to horses that pulled him apart. If the brothers were monsters, their enemies were no better.

  The most successful of the early mercenary chieftains was John Hawkwood, the one Englishman to rise to prominence fighting in Italy for pay. Of humble origins and probably illiterate, Hawkwood fought in France under King Edward III in the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War. He is believed to have been about forty when he entered Italy and became a member of the Great Company. In the early 1360s he was elected commander of its successor the White Company, and he spent the next thirty years engaged in almost every significant conflict in Italy. He and his company regularly changed employers, not infrequently signing on with a patron’s enemy. They would accept a condotta from one city and then take money from that city’s enemies in return for not attacking. Hawkwood came to be honored all the same, perhaps in part because he never made the mistake that led to the ruin of Ezzelino and many others: he never tried to carve out a principality for himself. He married into the Visconti dynasty of Milan, and when he died, the city of Florence buried him in state in its cathedral, where his monument can be seen to this day. King Richard II asked for the return of his body to England.

  By early in the fifteenth century the condottieri were becoming not just freebooting mercenaries but instruments of governance, and were more respectable as a result. It was another time of severe instability, with city-states large and small both threatened by external enemies and weakened from within as rival factions fought for control. Many of the cities had long been organized as communes, with substantial numbers of the citizens having at least some voice in government. Now, however, and with increasing frequency, powerful individuals (men both ambitious and rich, usually) were using the pervasive uncertainty as an excuse to take command, impose order on their own terms, and set themselves up as tyrants. As early as the thirteenth century, Dante had complained that “the cities of Italy are full of tyrants.” By the fifteenth century tyranny was the rule.

  Typically, upon seizing power a new tyrant would disarm the citizenry. This was not as unpopular a measure as one might suppose; random bloodshed stopped as swords and daggers disappeared, so that the change was not greatly deplored. Still, the need to maintain order and defend against invaders remained, and even leaders as supposedly enlightened as the Medici found it advisable to suppress dissent. The tyrants needed soldiers to do such work but, being usurpers, most found it impossible to trust the people they ruled. And so it became the practice to sign outsiders to condotta. This was made easier by Italy’s early development of a money economy. The employment of condottieri became policy even in such republics as Venice and Florence, partly because the merchants and bankers who dominated these cities had no wish to go soldiering themselves. The papacy too made frequent use of condotta. The lure of cash had a further effect, causing many tyrants to become condottieri themselves and see to it that their sons were trained to take up military careers. As the warlord families intermarried in an endless and largely futile quest for dependable allies, non-Italians found it impossible to win contracts. Condotta became an oblique way of paying tribute to a feared warlord—of buying his neutrality if not his friendship. Many ruling families became dependent on their earnings as mercenaries to cover the costs of running their own little states.

  The mid-fifteenth century produced the greatest of the condottieri. The most admired was a figure we have already encountered more than once because he was employed in almost every conflict of consequence during his lifetime. This was Federico da Montefeltro, scion of the dynasty that had long ruled the remote hilltop city of Urbino. The eagerness of other cities to hire him generated the fantastic sums with which he turned Urbino into an architectural showplace of international renown, established one of the greatest libraries and most brilliant courts of the century, and raised his family to ducal status.

  Even more spectacularly successful, and by a wide margin the most feared, was Francesco Sforza. Though not born into a ruling family, he gained admittance to the brotherhood of condottieri while still half-grown by virtue of being the son of one of the leading mercenary commanders of the early 1400s, Muzio Attendolo. In the course of his own impressive career, as a kind of early experiment in branding, this Attendolo had given himself the name Sforza, meaning “force.” Francesco, twenty-three when his father drowned crossing a river during one of their campaigns, took charge of the family business and soon showed himself to be a general of immense courage and rare ability. In the manner of his profession he changed sides whenever it was advantageous to do so, first fighting against Pope Eugenius IV and then contracting to work for him. Later, in the service of Venice, he inflicted a painful defeat on Milan, after which he married the sixteen-year-old only child of Milan’s ruler, the last Visconti duke. When his father-in-law died, Francesco laid claim to the ducal title. To win it he had to fend off challenges from the German emperor (whose fiefdom Milan was), the French duke of Orléans (whose mother was a Visconti), and the military might of Venice. In succeeding he became the only condottiere to found a ruling dynasty.

  It might go without saying, in light of all this, that there was nothing remotely demeaning about accepting employment under a condotta. The contrary was more often true: demanding a contract could be a kind of blackmail, a levy imposed by the strong upon the less strong. On the other hand, employment as a condottiere, even success as one, was no proof of ability or courage. The nature of the system meant that commanders rarely had reason to care passionately about whatever side they had been hired to fight for, or to put themselves in danger. Machiavelli would identify this problem, and the cynical self-interest that it engendered, as one reason for Italy’s inability to defend itself against invaders. Warfare in Italy, as long as it was conducted by Italians only, was often a ritual affair in which the risks even to combatants were kept within narrow limits and harm to civilians was often a thing to be avoided. Statistically, the warlords stood in far greater risk of being murdered by their own relatives than of dying in battle.

  All this would change when the foreign armies came.

  10

  Innocent VIII: Plumbing the Depths

  Sixtus IV’s priorities were not changed by the death of his nephew Pietro. He was still determined to start bringing the Papal States under control, pledged to oppose the advance of the Turks, and passionately, obsessively, blindly committed to lifting his family into the highest ranks of Italian society.

  The clarity of his goals and the strength of his will, however, were not matched by his talents as a strategist. He needed help not just in the execution but in the formulation of policy—in deciding how to get what he wanted. There were also tricky questions having to do with what he wanted most, because fighting the Turks and satisfying his young kinsmen proved to be not quite compatible objectives. Among the most obvious possible sources of counsel was Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. In his early forties now, with nearly two decades of experience as one of the Vatican’s top men, he had a deserved reputation as a hard worker and an intelligent, capable manager. His affability and even temperament had made him a well-liked member of the Sacred College, and his achievements in Spain had reinforced the good opinion that Sixtus had always had of him. Since returning to the papal court, however, Rodrigo had found himself eclipsed, first by Pietro Riario and then, after Pietro’s death, by his cousin Giuliano della Rovere. Though the pope’s nephews were by no means a united force—Giuliano allied himself with the Colonna, for example, while the Riario brothers encouraged Sixtus to make war on them—the conflicts among them served only to increase their visibility and deepen the shadows to which Rodrigo found himself relegated. The death of Pietro improved his situation somewhat, making it impossible for a bereft pope not to increase his reliance on a vet
eran vice-chancellor whose judgment he respected. Rodrigo remained a power in the great bureaucracy that was the Curia as well as in consistory, but a power of not quite the first rank. The seat at the pope’s right hand went not to him, not even to Sixtus’s strong-willed and gifted nephew Giuliano, but to the worst choice available, the late Pietro’s conspicuously untalented brother Girolamo, now lord of Imola.

  Trouble did not follow quickly from the pope’s decision, however. Instead there ensued an Indian summer of quiet and stability for Rome and for Italy, the last tranquil interlude of Cardinal Borgia’s life. The wars with the Turks raged on, but so far out on the fringes of Europe that the monarchs of the West usually found it possible to ignore them. In Moldavia, at the eastern end of faraway Romania and therefore seemingly in another world, the amazing Stephen III was annually beating back invasions by Mehmed II. In 1476 his neighbor Vlad III Dracula met his death in a last courageous stand in Wallachia, but his passing attracted little notice in Italy. The Italians paid somewhat more attention when the Turks captured the Black Sea port of Caffa, a crucial link in the chain of commercial colonies that Genoa had painstakingly put together in the East over the centuries. But nothing came of Sixtus’s call for a counteroffensive, and the Turks met little opposition as they fanned out from Caffa to take control of the whole Crimean coast.

  In the spring following the fall of Caffa a flood of unprecedented magnitude buried much of Rome under a blanket of stinking mud and brought on an outbreak of plague that by summer had decimated the population and sent the pope and his court fleeing to Viterbo. Months later Milan was shaken when the cruelties of the psychopathic sadist Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza caused him to be assassinated by desperate subjects who were destroyed in their turn. Galeazzo Maria’s heir was a seven-year-old child, his son Gian Galeazzo, and though the boy’s mother Bona of Savoy attempted to take charge, she was pushed aside by her brother-in-law, the murdered duke’s brother Ludovico. Proclaiming himself regent, Ludovico restored order so quickly that none of Milan’s neighbors had time to exploit the situation.