The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  Ludovico’s urgent wish to become duke of Milan fit in nicely with Charles’s aspirations. As early as 1491 the young king communicated his willingness to support Ludovico in supplanting his nephew as soon as circumstances permitted. Thereby he won Milan’s strongman as his ally and willing agent. In the autumn of 1492 Charles summoned representatives of his kingdom’s three estates to the city of Tours to hear his announcement of a crusade against the Turks and his intention to take possession of Naples along the way. When the more experienced of his counselors threw up their hands at the impracticality of all this—among other problems it was impossibly beyond the French crown’s financial resources—Charles cheerfully ignored them. It was at about this time that the Venetian diplomat Zaccaria Contarini, in a description of the France of his day, included a revealing sketch of the young king.

  “He is small and ill-made,” Contarini wrote, “ugly of countenance, with large, colorless eyes; he is short-sighted; his nose is aquiline and both longer and thicker than is natural; he has lips likewise thick, always hanging open; his hands twitch with spasmodic movements very ugly to see, and his speech comes hesitantly. My opinion may be erroneous, but it seems to me certain that physically and morally he does not amount to a great deal.”

  As king of a nation the power of which had been painstakingly restored by his father’s long years of crafty diplomacy, however, Charles amounted to a great deal indeed. He had it within his means to commit great folly, and to that purpose he was willing to give away much of what Louis XI had gained. To make certain that his back and flanks would be secure when he departed France for Italy and perhaps the Ottoman Empire as well, he entered into a series of fantastically costly treaties. With the Treaty of Étaples, his onetime hero Henry VII of England agreed to call home the invasion force that he had sent to Brittany and relinquish his claim to that county (a claim he had never expected to make good), receiving in return a payoff in the colossal amount of £159,000, payable in installments that would double the income of the Tudor court for years. To secure the Treaty of Barcelona, and with it Ferdinand’s and Isabella’s pledge of neutrality, Charles paid an even higher price, surrendering the Pyrenees regions of Roussillon and Cerdagne. Finally he signed the Treaty of Senlis, by which he renounced his claims to the counties of Burgundy, Artois, and Charolais in favor of Maximilian of Hapsburg. His counselors were in despair.

  Despite everything he was sacrificing, it was going to be impossible for Charles to legitimate his designs on Naples unless he could secure papal approval. He needed to get Alexander VI, who as pope was Naples’s suzerain or overlord, to repudiate Ferrante and his dynasty and invest him, Charles, with the crown. At the end of 1493, in a fresh effort to win the pope over, he sent a delegation headed by his chief minister and mentor Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of St. Malo. This mission, like the one sent earlier in the year for the same purpose, came to nothing. Alexander and Briçonnet had long talks, the pope going so far as to offer his visitor a cardinal’s hat in return for making his young master see the dangers, not only to Italy but to France itself, of an attack on Naples. Briçonnet appears to have found the pope’s arguments persuasive and his offer tempting, but to the extent that he expressed his concerns upon returning to France, they had no impact.

  If Charles cared about the pope’s refusal, he did not care enough to be deterred. His court had become home to a large contingent of Neapolitan nobles who had fled northward to escape destruction after the failure of their rebellion against Ferrante. These refugees told the king something he was childishly delighted to hear: that all Naples would rise to support him as soon as he arrived. France’s cardinals (not one of whom had been present at the 1492 conclave) were meanwhile telling him that Alexander’s opinion was of no importance because he had not been honestly elected and so was not a legitimate pope. In removing Alexander, these cardinals said, Charles would be rescuing Holy Mother Church and making himself all the more a hero. Bankers from various Italian city-states were demonstrating their commitment to the great cause by offering to lend Charles huge sums—so long as he put up the crown jewels as collateral and agreed to pay fourteen percent interest. Hearing such things, monarchs less gullible than Charles VIII might have found it easy to believe that the enterprise he was planning had been ordained by God and could not fail.

  Still, Naples was a long way from France, and to reach it Charles would have to take his army first across the Alps, then across the great duchy of Milan, and finally across the Apennines. And even after all the loans and all the pawning of royal treasure, he was seriously short of funds. But then Ludovico Sforza stepped forward with an offer impossible to refuse. He promised not only to do nothing to impede the passage of French troops through Milan, but to facilitate their advance with all the means at his disposal. He would put his warships at the service of the king, along with money and five hundred “men at arms”—mounted and armored knights accompanied by their squires and pages.

  Italy had long been a powder keg. Now, in an act that he would live to regret bitterly, Ludovico had lit the fuse.

  Background

  MADNESS AND MILAN

  THE MILAN OF LUDOVICO SFORZA WAS A CLASSIC TYRANNY OF the distinctly Italian type: a city-state ruled by a family that had taken it by force, used force to keep itself in power, and had only the scantiest legitimate claim to its position, its wealth, and its power.

  It was also the greatest of the tyrannies, with a capital city that was immense by the standards of the time (as many as a quarter of a million people may have lived within the walls of Milan as the fifteenth century approached its close). It had command of the great Lombard Plain with its thousands of square miles of fertile farmland, and a large middle class that was growing rich in banking and the manufacture of products ranging from silk to weaponry.

  Milan was an archetype in another way as well. Its ruling dynasty, which had been in place for 215 years when Rodrigo Borgia became pope, exemplified a phenomenon that was tragically common among both the greatest and pettiest of Italy’s warlord families. Power beyond the reach of any rule of law, mixed with the insecurities inherent in having little right to that power and being under chronic threat from jealous and ambitious rivals, had a way of breeding homicidal psychopaths. The Ludovico Sforza who invited Charles VIII of France into Italy in 1493 was a paragon of sanity, decency, and restraint compared with the most memorable of his Visconti and Sforza forebears. This of course raises the question of whether it was precisely because he was not as savage as those forebears that his fate would be tragic.

  Ludovico and his brother Cardinal Ascanio owed their exalted positions in state and church to half a dozen generations of talented, strong, ruthlessly grasping, and in some cases only marginally sane ancestors. All the Visconti and Sforza were tall and fair with red-blond hair—descended, almost certainly, from the Langobards or Lombards who poured into Italy from Germany in the sixth century and gave their name to the enormous plain on which they settled. The Visconti were already prominent among the Milanese nobility when, in 1277, one of their members, a warlike seventy-year-old archbishop, defeated a rival family, made himself master, signore, of the city, and positioned his relatives to retain control after his death. Half a century later the fourth Visconti to serve as Milan’s prelate, the “pseudo-cardinal” Giovanni (pseudo because his red hat was conferred by a schismatic antipope), paid half a million florins for papal recognition of himself and his brother Luchino as official co-rulers. The brothers greatly expanded the Milanese state, absorbing many other cities on the Lombard Plain.

  Their conquests passed in the next generation to another set of brothers: Matteo, Galeazzo, and Bernabò Visconti, the first members of the family to show symptoms of serious mental (and moral) instability. Matteo was so incompetent and irresponsible, and such a slave to bestial sexual appetites, as to make not only himself but the whole family an object of popular revulsion. He died suddenly one evening after supper, and though there is no proof that he was
poisoned by his brothers (their mother insisted that he was), it is not implausible that Galeazzo and Bernabò had resorted to murder to protect their own positions. For the next twenty-three years each of the two surviving brothers had possession of half of the Milanese state, Galeazzo ruling the western portion from a great palace at Pavia while Bernabò ruled the east from the city of Milan. The latter became legendary for his ferocity and bellicosity, in the process getting himself excommunicated by three successive popes and on one occasion forcing envoys to eat the bull of excommunication that they had traveled from Rome to deliver. Chastised by an archbishop of Milan who happened, rather unusually, not to be a Visconti, he replied with a purely rhetorical question: “Do you not know, you fool, that here I am pope and emperor and lord in all my lands and that no one can do anything in my lands save I permit it—no, not even God?”

  Even if the most terrible stories about Bernabò were the inventions of his enemies, it does appear to be true that he had a propensity to remove people who offended him by burying them alive, and to inflict gruesomely disproportionate punishments on those accused of crimes. (Anyone daring to hunt on land reserved for his use, for example, would be blinded or hanged.) But he was not entirely monstrous: law and order were strictly maintained during his long, hard rule, and his humblest subjects found that they could expect to be treated justly in the Milanese courts even when challenging the rich and powerful. Bernabò’s fatal mistake turned out to be not his excessive willingness to make war on his neighbors, not the licentiousness that made him the admitted father of at least thirty children, but his failure to take the measure of his nephew Gian Galeazzo, who had inherited command of the western half of the duchy upon the death of his father, Galeazzo.

  Gian Galeazzo was a refined and cultivated man, exceptionally well educated by the standards of fourteenth-century warlords and free of the rude and brutish arrogance of his uncle. Bernabò interpreted all this as foppish weakness and regarded his nephew (whom he had also forced to become his son-in-law) with undisguised contempt. Told that Gian Galeazzo was plotting against him, he dismissed the warnings as ridiculous and so found himself being tricked, taken captive, and thrown into a prison where he soon died, reportedly of poisoning. At which point the quiet Gian Galeazzo reunited the two halves of the duchy and launched a campaign of conquest more ambitious than anything attempted by his predecessors.

  Tall and impressively handsome, Gian Galeazzo was also physically timid. He spent most of his adult life in semiseclusion, protected by phalanxes of armed guards. Though he never commanded an army in the field, he hired capable condottieri, instructed them never to engage an enemy except when they had a decisive advantage, and spent lavishly to make sure that they always had such an advantage. Step by step he brought city after city to heel—first Verona and Vicenza, then Padua and Pisa and Siena, and eventually Perugia, Assisi, Nocera, Spoleto, and Lucca. Finally even great Bologna submitted to him. Along the way Gian Galeazzo became the first duke of Milan, paying Holy Roman emperor-elect Wenceslaus of Bohemia one hundred thousand ducats for the title. The flagrant sale of such an exalted rank—the highest after royalty—was such a scandal that it contributed to Wenceslaus’s deposition from the imperial throne. But it was not revocable and gave Gian Galeazzo a semblance of legitimacy.

  Gian Galeazzo’s father, in an earlier effort to purchase respectability, had spent a comparable fortune to secure the marriage of his twelve-year-old son to a daughter of the financially desperate King Jean II of France. The boy became a father at fourteen, but when his wife died after ten years of marriage, only one of her six children, a daughter named Valentina, survived. When this daughter was grown, Gian Galeazzo returned her to the French royal family, marrying her to Louis duke of Orléans, brother of King Charles VI. Two generations later this marriage would have troublesome consequences: when the male line of Viscontis became extinct, Valentina’s grandson, another Louis of Orléans, would come forward with a credible claim to the duchy of Milan.

  Gian Galeazzo aspired to be no mere duke but monarch of a kingdom of Lombardy encompassing not only his duchy but all of Tuscany and more. When Bologna fell into his hands, this dream appeared to be within reach; only an exhausted and isolated Florence remained to be taken. But Milan was exhausted also, its wealth gone to fund Gian Galeazzo’s wars and palaces and other extravagances, its people (called “subjects” rather than citizens now that their master was a duke) taxed to the brink of rebellion. All remained in suspension as Gian Galeazzo, triumphant but without the means for further action, withdrew into deeper seclusion and contracted the fever of which he died aged fifty.

  His collection of conquests fell apart with astonishing speed, one city-state after another breaking free from the regency of his widow, Duchess Caterina. She was Gian Galeazzo’s first cousin, daughter of the late Bernabò, who had bullied his nephew into marrying her after the death of his French first wife. By her he had two sons, both of whom became exemplars of the dangers of inbreeding, displaying all the worst characteristics of the Visconti bloodline and few if any of its strengths. The elder, Giovanni Maria, was barely in his teens when he became duke, and in short order he had his mother thrown into prison. Like her father before her she soon died, and she too is said to have been poisoned. The new duke was a depraved monster—the word really does apply—best remembered for the delight he took in watching his dogs tear apart the bodies of living men. When he was assassinated at age twenty-three, mercifully before reproducing himself, his brother and successor Filippo Maria proved to be, if less obviously insane, profoundly disturbed. His father Gian Galeazzo’s reclusiveness and paranoia were in him carried to extremes. Perhaps because physical ugliness intensified his innate shyness, perhaps just because he became too fat to mount a horse, he sequestered himself behind the high walls of his father’s grandiose palace and made himself the center of a network of spies, secret agents, guards, and soldiers responsible for protecting him from his guards. He waged war across northern Italy without himself ever coming within miles of a skirmish, using condottieri in a lifelong, sometimes atrociously cruel and only partly successful campaign to restore the duchy to what it had been at the time of Gian Galeazzo’s death.

  Why he bothered is a mystery, for he never displayed the smallest interest in the future of the dynasty. He had a marriage of convenience with the wealthy widow of one of his father’s generals, and a single mistress with whom he sired two daughters only one of whom, Bianca Maria, lived past infancy. When in 1430 he betrothed the six-year-old girl to the greatest condottiere of the century, the thirty-year-old widower Francesco Sforza (whose first wife and child had been murdered by his aunt), Filippo Maria offered valuable properties as his daughter’s dowry and appears to have been motivated solely by a determination to keep Sforza in his employ. He later made repeated attempts to break off the engagement, with Sforza sometimes on his payroll and at other times leading the armies of Milan’s enemies. When the wedding finally took place in 1441 (Bianca being sixteen by then, the bridegroom forty), Filippo Maria was forced to consent to it because of defeats inflicted on him by Venetian forces commanded by none other than his prospective son-in-law.

  Filippo Maria anointed no heir, and when he died in 1447, the claimants to Milan included the Holy Roman emperor (because he was Milan’s feudal overlord), Valentina Visconti’s son Charles duke of Orléans, the Republic of Venice, and Francesco Sforza. All were held off as Milan became a republic, but this proved a doomed enterprise. Sforza made war on the capital, forcing it to surrender after a prolonged siege that reduced the population to eating cats and dogs. Once securely in place as duke, he became less interested in conquest than in protecting what he had won and turned into a force for peace and stability. He forged a close friendship with Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence, and the two worked together to put a durable balance of power in place across Italy.

  He found himself happily married as well. Bianca Maria Visconti Sforza proved to be a dependable manager, a cap
able diplomat, and therefore a duchess of real consequence. The pair had eight children, and of these only one, unfortunately their eldest son Galeazzo Maria, gave evidence of having inherited the Visconti tendency to madness. Upon succeeding his father at age twenty-two, Galeazzo Maria set about building a reputation as a rapist, torturer, and murderer (starving to death a priest accused of predicting that his reign would be short). He cast aside his worried mother and inevitably was accused of having her poisoned when she died in exile. We have already seen the calamities that flowed from all this. First Galeazzo Maria was himself murdered, by Milanese nobles he had pushed too far. Then his brother Ludovico seized power, took custody of the seven-year-old heir to the ducal title, Gian Galeazzo, and proclaimed himself regent. Things got mortally serious a decade later, when Gian Galeazzo came of age, his wife Isabella protested to her grandfather Ferrante of Naples that Ludovico was refusing to relinquish control, and Ferrante broke with Milan and left Ludovico feeling so alone and fearful that he not only invited the king of France to invade Italy but offered to pay him to do so.

  Anxieties about Naples notwithstanding, by 1493 there was every reason for the Milanese to think themselves fortunate to be ruled by Ludovico. He was as solidly normal a man as the Visconti-Sforza family tree had produced, with the exception of Duke Francesco. Intelligent, energetic, and cultivated, superbly educated under the direction of his mother Bianca, he displayed none of the psychopathic viciousness of his elder brother, his maternal grandfather, his great-uncle, and other ancestors dating back to Matteo and Bernabò Visconti. Since pushing his sister-in-law out of the regency, he had given much attention to the development of Milan’s economy. He had come to be known as Il Moro not (as has often been written) because he was dark like a Moor (in fact he was fair with his family’s golden hair) but because moro is the Italian word for his personal emblem, the mulberry tree. Known since ancient times as “the most prudent of trees,” last to put out leaves in the springtime, the mulberry was an essential source of food for the worms on which Milan’s lucrative silk-manufacturing industry was based.