The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  Rome exploded in an orgy of fresh violence upon learning of the pontiff’s passing. Mobs plundered the palaces of the Riarii, the Colonna came flooding back intent on vengeance, and Girolamo, in company with his Orsini allies, marched toward the city hoping to take control before anyone else could. As he approached, his young wife Caterina Sforza assumed command of the Castel Sant’Angelo in her husband’s name. The cardinals, meanwhile, were preparing for the burial of Sixtus and the opening of a conclave. When they issued orders for the Colonna to leave Rome and for Girolamo and the Orsini to stay out, civil war seemed imminent. The situation was defused by Marco Barbo, an able and serious-minded young cardinal who owed his red hat to his uncle Paul II. He persuaded the Orsini, the Colonna, and Girolamo to obey the Sacred College’s instructions, averting a bloody showdown.

  Caterina Sforza Riario, disgusted to learn that her husband had turned back rather than bringing reinforcements, surrendered the Castel to the College of Cardinals in return for a payment of four thousand ducats. She then returned with Girolamo to Forlì, unofficial capital of their mini-empire in the Romagna. The Orsini and Colonna withdrew to their lairs in the hill country outside Rome. The city became subdued enough for the election to proceed.

  This was Rodrigo’s fourth conclave. He was in his fifties now, old enough to be taken seriously as a candidate, and though his foreign birth remained a disadvantage, it was increasingly counterbalanced by the accomplishments of his undeniably distinguished career. His credentials could not have been better—he was now both dean of the Sacred College and prior of the cardinal-bishops—and in 1484’s first round of balloting he received several votes. Giuliano della Rovere also showed strength in spite of being barely in his forties and having little experience as an administrator or a diplomat; the presence in the college of three cousins gave him a rock-solid base of support. The leader by an impressive margin, however, proved to be Marco Barbo. His strong showing reflected both the respect of his colleagues and their gratitude for his success in preventing a disaster just days before. But the Venetian origins that had helped to elect his uncle Paul II were now a major handicap. Fear of Venice’s new hunger for territory, along with resentment of the city’s separate peace with the Turks and the benefits that had come to it through the Peace of Bagnolo, ran high enough among the electors to stop him from increasing his vote.

  That evening Rodrigo Borgia and Giuliano della Rovere, both of them controlling enough votes to act as power brokers, met to consider their options. They had no interest in helping each other to the throne, which put Rodrigo out of the running. Della Rovere for his part had no chance because he was Sixtus’s nephew, too young, and a disagreeable character to boot. After some discussion the pair of them agreed to join in supporting an unobjectionable nonentity named Giovanni Battista Cibo, a tall, handsome, and mildly genial son of Genoa. Cibo’s roots contributed importantly to his appeal: Genoa had grown prosperous through seafaring, though never as rich or powerful as Venice, and the long rivalry between the two states had cost the Genoese much and taught them to regard the Venetians as a malignant force. Many cardinals were willing, in 1484, to embrace almost any enemy of Venice as their friend. Cibo was elected without difficulty the next morning and took the throne as Pope Innocent VIII—a name that can sound absurd to modern ears. Those who had hoped for a different result voiced the customary complaints about corruption—Rodrigo was just one of several cardinals accused of having sold their votes—but credible evidence is entirely lacking.

  The selection of Cibo turned out to be better for della Rovere than for Rodrigo. The new pope was by no means unfriendly to the vice-chancellor, in the postelection dispersal of benefices appointing him administrator and therefore beneficiary of a major Valencian monastery. Other signs of favor followed: in an early bull Innocent described Rodrigo as “constantly at work and afraid of no kind of labor,” praised him for his prudence, acuteness, mature counsel, and loyalty, and stated that he “fills first place in the order of our venerable brethren of the Sacred College.” It was obvious nonetheless that in the most important matters Innocent was della Rovere’s man. This should have surprised no one, it having been della Rovere who persuaded his uncle to make the compliant Cibo a cardinal back in 1473. For Italy the result was going to be further tragedy, and as before it would be brought about by greed, vindictiveness, and rank stupidity.

  The tragedy opened this time in an essentially trivial way, with a visit to Rome by Ferrante’s son and heir, Alfonso duke of Calabria. Though approaching forty, an able enough soldier when not in the grip of his occasional fits of panic, Alfonso proved to be an absurdly ham-handed envoy. He so offended the papal court with his boorishness and arrogance that he returned home having accomplished nothing except the alienation of Innocent and Giuliano della Rovere alike. Thus, when Alfonso later persuaded his father to launch an attack on the chronically troublesome barons of Naples, Cardinal della Rovere demanded that the pope weigh in on the side of the barons. Though Rodrigo counseled patience, Innocent followed della Rovere’s instructions. Reasons of self-protection once again impelled other powers to let themselves be drawn in, and another bloody mess ensued. Things did not go well for Rome, Innocent quickly lost his enthusiasm for military adventures, and the result was a settlement in which Ferrante received bits and pieces of the southernmost Papal States and in return promised amnesty for his rebellious nobles. Nothing could be more characteristic of Ferrante and his son than the nonchalance with which they violated this promise at the first opportunity, butchering as many of the barons as they could get their hands on and seizing their lands and castles.

  The effects of this short war were far-reaching and significant. Cardinal della Rovere, because he had drawn Innocent into an unnecessary conflict that cost much and ended in humiliation for Rome, lost his influence at the papal court. The resentment that he had long directed at Rodrigo Borgia, perhaps because he had been kept on as Sixtus’s vice-chancellor in spite of not being a member of the family, turned into a hard and enduring hatred. The surviving barons of Naples, who with good reason had always feared and distrusted Ferrante, began to look far to the north for deliverance. They sent envoys first to Milan, then to Hungary, and finally and most fatefully, as time would show, to France. They told all who would listen that Ferrante had no right to the Neapolitan throne and should be unseated. All these developments would bear toxic fruit.

  The rest of Innocent’s reign was a sordid affair. He had two grown children (not sixteen as has often been said), both of them illegitimate but born in his youth before he took holy orders, so that their existence was not really a scandal. He did create scandal, however, by putting the Vatican and its treasury at the service of his offspring. The papal palace became the scene of lavish festivities when the pope’s granddaughter was married to a grandson of Ferrante, and his son Franceschetto to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s daughter. This Franceschetto was a singularly worthless character, dissolute, spineless, and evidently somewhat dim. Once, after losing fourteen thousand ducats gambling with Cardinal Raffaele Riario, he went crying to his father that he had been cheated. It was partly to finance the profligacy of his dependents that Innocent dragged the papacy to new depths of financial corruption, putting more and more offices up for auction—new positions were created solely for the purpose of being sold—and creating a special bank for the sale of pardons. Rulers from Naples to France took advantage of his weakness to encroach on the Church’s property and prerogatives.

  It was in the year of Franceschetto’s marriage that Girolamo Riario came to his fittingly violent end. He and his wife Caterina, after retiring to the Romagna, had imposed on their two little city-states of Imola and Forlì painfully high taxes and the kind of savagely arbitrary rule that was typical of the region. One April evening, while idling with cronies in his newly built Forlì palace, Girolamo was set upon by a gang of assassins led by the captain of his personal guard, Cecco Orsi. While her husband was dying under a flurry of knife blows
, his body stripped naked and thrown out a window onto the piazza below, Caterina was warned of the danger. She barricaded herself and her children—in a decade of marriage she had borne six sons and a daughter—in her bedchamber. She was eventually made a prisoner but persuaded Orsi and his brothers and their fellow conspirators that if they allowed her to enter Forlì’s rocca or fortress, which had refused to surrender to her husband’s killers, she could get its commandant to open the gates. Once inside, however, she mounted the battlements and hurled down curses on the Orsi and their comrades. One of the most colorful stories of the Italian Renaissance—not certainly true, but endlessly repeated because so typical of the beautiful and ferocious Caterina—tells of how, when her enemies threatened to kill her children, she retorted that she could make more children and lifted her skirts to display the equipment that gave her the ability to do so.

  She was soon rescued by troops dispatched from Milan, where her cousin was duke and her uncle Ludovico was regent, and from Bologna, whose ruling Bentivoglio clan welcomed the opportunity to make clear that in the Romagna there could be no tolerance of rebellion. Caterina, coming into her own now, took personal charge of punishing the conspirators. Those who could be caught were publicly tortured before being executed, their houses leveled, and their wives and children crowded into dungeons. The assassin Cecco Orsi’s aged father, who had no involvement in the plot and when he learned of it cursed his sons for failing to kill Caterina and her entire brood when they had the chance, was forced to witness the demolition of his palace before being handed over to the butchers.

  Caterina, claiming to act in the name of her eldest son, took up the reins of power in Forlì and Imola and the miles of rich farmland that came with them. She became Italy’s only female ruler, so strong of will and so cold-bloodedly ruthless that before long she became legendary as a true virago—a woman with all the characteristics of the most formidable males. She did not mourn her husband, who in addition to being a sadist had been fat and lazy and as cowardly as he was stupid. The character of their marriage is suggested, chillingly, in something that Caterina wrote before his murder: “You cannot imagine the life I lead with my husband. It has often caused me to envy those who die.” Now she was free and answerable to no one. If it is true as has been alleged that Lorenzo de’ Medici was involved in the plot to kill Girolamo—by 1488 the last participant in the Pazzi Conspiracy still living—or if Pope Innocent encouraged the Orsi as has also been suggested, Caterina appears neither to have cared nor to have shown any resentment. The purging of all opposition in Forlì was sufficient to her needs, personally as well as politically.

  As Innocent’s reign limped to its sorry conclusion, he chose Tomás de Torquemada, nephew of the famed cardinal-theologian encountered earlier, to be inquisitor general in Spain. At about the same time he granted indulgences to all who would contribute to a war of extermination on a puritanical sect known as the Waldensians in central Europe. He went through the motions of urging the powers of Europe to mount a campaign against the Turks but was not heartbroken when the conflicts of the Hapsburgs of Germany with Hungary and France made any such venture impossible. The extent of his commitment to resisting the Turkish threat can be inferred from his willingness, in 1489, to accept Sultan Bayezid II’s offer of 120,000 crowns plus an annual stipend of 45,000 ducats to keep his brother Cem in the custody of the Vatican. In effect he was agreeing to run a kind of prison-hotel for displaced Ottoman princes.

  Almost the only responsible ruler in all Italy was Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose exertions to maintain a stable balance of power had defused one explosive situation after another. By age forty he had been the chief executive in Florence through two difficult decades. He was worn out, had many interests unrelated to governing and a son whom he believed to be capable of taking over for him, and was talking of withdrawing from public life. He was also in financial difficulty, having been not nearly as skillful at the family business of banking as he was in other fields. In late 1491 his health was declining alarmingly, rheumatic fever having aggravated the effects of a disabling affliction that his physicians put under their catchall diagnosis of gout. One doctor prescribed pulverized pearls and precious gems, which must have been approximately as helpful as doses of ground glass. When he died in April 1492, aged only forty-three, his passing sparked intense grief in Florence. Elsewhere the news aroused mixed feelings, but the whole of Italy would have gone into mourning could it have foreseen how badly this greatest of the Medici would be missed in the terrible times that now lay just ahead.

  When Innocent followed Lorenzo to the grave three and a half months later, few except his relatives could see any reason to be sorry.

  11

  The Best Man for the Job

  I am Pope! I am Pope!

  This is what Rodrigo Borgia is reported to have cried out in jubilation, almost in ecstasy, upon being chosen by his fellow cardinals to succeed Innocent VIII in August 1492. An alternative and more imperious version, translated from the Florentine Italian of five centuries ago, is:

  I! I am Pope!

  These words have invariably been interpreted as a spontaneous eruption of dark things that supposedly lay concealed under Cardinal Rodrigo’s cheerful exterior: pride, arrogance, joy in mastering people and things and bending them to sinister purposes.

  But of course his outburst—assuming that it happened—can just as plausibly be seen in an entirely different light. As an expression of surprise—which Rodrigo’s election almost certainly was, to himself no less than to others. As an effusion of simple, almost childish joy from a man who had served five successive popes, had been witness to their innumerable failures and misdeeds, their few and dubious triumphs and sometimes gruesome tragedies, and was justified in thinking himself capable of doing better.

  To which it is necessary to add that it is not certain—that it is on balance less than probable—that Rodrigo ever said any such thing. The first report of it appeared nine years after his election, in an anonymous pamphlet written for the purpose of showing him to be what its author explicitly called him: “the monster,” “this cursed beast” in the course of whose papacy “the bestiality and savagery of Nero and Caligula are surpassed.” Suffice it to note, for present purposes, that such a depiction of Rodrigo’s performance as pope is dubious at best.

  This is the Borgia problem in a nutshell: wildly outlandish accusations accepted as true generation after generation because when taken together they add up to one of the most gloriously lurid stories in all of history. Anecdotes about murder and incest that are especially delicious because their subject is a pope, and that have become so firmly embedded in the consciousness of the whole world that to question them can seem fatuous, to challenge them preposterous.

  If the problem begins with a notorious garden party in Siena during the reign of Pius II, it bursts into full bloom with the conclave that raised Rodrigo to the throne as Pope Alexander VI. It is vividly apparent, for example, in the work of the first noteworthy historian of medieval and Renaissance Italy, Francesco Guicciardini. He wrote—and influenced countless later historians by writing—that Cardinal Borgia’s election is a tale of how “with money, offices, benefices, promises, and all his powers and resources he suborned and bought the votes of the cardinals and the College.” And that the 1492 conclave was “a hideous and abominable thing, and a most apt beginning to [the new pope’s] future deplorable proceedings and behavior.”

  As with so much Borgia history, Guicciardini’s allegations require closer examination than they have usually received. At the time of which he is writing, Guicciardini was a nine-year-old schoolboy in Florence. He never met a Borgia, is not known to have set foot in Rome when the Borgias were in power there, and in the course of growing to manhood absorbed his home city’s deep-rooted hostility toward Roman and papal power in general and the Borgias specifically. He could be ridiculously credulous, reporting for example that one night early in Alexander’s reign three suns appeared overhe
ad and that “huge numbers of armed soldiers riding enormous steeds were seen for many days passing across the sky with a terrible clash of trumpets and drums.” He laced his History of Italy (written some forty years after Rodrigo became Alexander) with the choicest products of the anti-Borgia pamphleteers who flourished in the opening decades of the sixteenth century. Though a pioneer in the use of documentary evidence, he had no credible documents to work with in writing of the 1492 conclave and little more than gossip to draw upon in dealing with the lives of the Borgias.

  That Rodrigo nursed little hope of being elected is suggested by the fact that, during the five months or more during which Innocent VIII was declining toward death, he made no effort to increase the number of votes available to him. He could have asked the two cardinals then resident in Spain, his cousin Luis Juan del Milà (who had been appointed to the College of Cardinals with him back in 1456) and Pedro González de Mendoza (who owed his red hat to Rodrigo’s mission to Castile in the early seventies), to travel to Rome in time for the increasingly inevitable election. They would have represented nearly ten percent of the electors present at the conclave, providing a counterweight to the various nephews of Sixtus IV on hand to vote for their cousin Giuliano della Rovere.