The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  He knew that, with the king of France preparing to descend upon him, he needed to organize a defense and was going to require help in doing so. Ferrante had attempted to provide him with a lasting source of help by marrying him to the daughter of one Sforza duke and his daughter to another. Thanks to Ludovico Sforza’s usurpation, however, that connection was now worse than useless. The late Pope Innocent’s pledge to install him as king was likewise useless. Other support was needed, which explains why Alfonso and Ferrante, to secure Pope Alexander’s friendship, had already bestowed rich estates, grand titles, and Sancia of Aragon on young Jofrè Borgia, endowed the duke of Gandía with a lifelong income, and granted lucrative benefices to Cardinal Cesare. The benefits of having done these things seemed almost trivial, however, when balanced against the certain knowledge that Charles VIII was preparing to invade and for that purpose was assembling an army bigger than any seen in Italy in living memory.

  Alexander’s connections to the House of Aragon notwithstanding, the question of whom to anoint as Ferrante’s successor had no easy answer. Though at the urging of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere and others Charles was threatening to depose the pope, nothing could have been more obvious than his readiness to forgive and forget Alexander’s refusal to approve his invasion. In return he wanted only one thing, something that would cost the pope nothing in the near term. He wanted an assurance of papal investment as king of Naples once his campaign had succeeded. And he had much to offer in return. If as seemed likely the French army proved to be an irresistible force once it was on the march, it would place in Charles’s hands the ability to dispense rewards beyond anything that Alfonso of Naples could ever possibly offer. In any case the time for artful dodging—for positioning himself as the friend of Milan and Naples as well, or at least as the enemy of neither—had ended. Someone was going to become king of Naples, and Alexander had no choice but to place a bet.

  He did so on April 18, when gathered with the cardinals in consistory. To the indignation of Ascanio Sforza and the French members of the Sacred College, he declared his intention to send a legate to Naples to crown Alfonso on his behalf without delay. Part of his motive was, almost certainly, to present King Charles with a fait accompli and thereby—with luck—discourage him from invading. Also, by showing his hand he was signaling to the other Italian rulers that the time had come for them to do the same. He underscored the point by assigning the coronation duties to his nephew and confidant Cardinal Giovanni Borgia, and by instructing him to proceed to Ferrara and Venice upon leaving Naples and encourage those cities too to come to Alfonso’s support. Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere’s response was to depart for the north, first for Milan and then on to the court of the French king. He sensed the opportunity for which he had been waiting. Now that Alexander had in effect declared himself an opponent of France, or if not that at least unwilling to acquiesce in a French conquest of Naples, the gullible Charles was more likely than ever to see the wisdom of replacing him with someone more cooperative. It need hardly be said that della Rovere was confident that the king would not have to look far to find exactly the right replacement.

  Wiser men than Charles might have thought success a certainty when so many important Italians were not only encouraging him to invade but offering to join his campaign and help to finance it. Within weeks of Alexander’s decision to confer the Neapolitan crown on Alfonso II, therefore, Charles had his war machine in motion, sending all the great and petty powers of Italy scrambling to save themselves from disaster or even, should opportunities arise, to profit from the confusion and mayhem. The jealousies and conflicting ambitions that had always divided the Italian states, worsened now by panic, removed any possibility of their coming together in the common defense. Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara, who had done his best to stay clear of war since his conflict with Venice a decade before had brought his dynasty to the edge of ruin, now saw a chance to recover some of what had been lost. He not only allied his duchy with France and Milan—that was no surprise, his family having long looked to Milan for protection against Venice, and his daughter Beatrice being married to Ludovico il Moro—but sent off a son to join the French army. The Venetians, whose resources would have been sufficient to make even Charles think twice about proceeding, withdrew to a position of neutrality. Giovanni Bentivoglio, strongman of Bologna, also had the capacity to make things difficult for Charles but would continue to temporize until it was too late for his decision to matter.

  Charles moved with glacial slowness at first, evidently not caring that as the weeks passed the summer was passing too and with it the best months for offensive operations. He was still at Lyons at the beginning of June, when Cardinal della Rovere caught up with him and added his insistent voice to the many urging him to press on and show no more mercy to Pope Alexander than to Alfonso II. Della Rovere, until recently on cordial terms with Naples, was now its implacable enemy thanks solely to Alfonso’s recognition by the pope. This was characteristic behavior on della Rovere’s part; he had thrown in with Charles for no better reason than that the French king was the only man in Europe able and presumably willing to tear the papal tiara from Alexander’s head. When Charles finally got his forces in motion once again, he advanced only as far as Vienne before stopping for three weeks of amusements including dalliance with the gaggle of mistresses that accompanied him wherever he went.

  On June 14, at the Orsini fortress of Vicovaro northeast of Rome, a pathetically small assembly of princes and warlords gathered to explore ways of mounting a resistance. The key participants were Alfonso II and his liege lord the pope. The two devoted part of the day to a discussion so private that no one else was admitted. Also in attendance, somewhat improbably, were the chiefs of Rome’s two great baronial clans, men more experienced at fighting one another than at tangling with foreigners. Fabrizio Colonna, who shared the leadership of his family with his cousin Prospero, had come to Vicovaro in spite of having recently signed a condotta that put him on the payroll of Charles VIII. It was typical of the relaxed view that Italian warlords took of their contractual obligations that Fabrizio saw nothing wrong in exchanging views with his employer’s principal opponents, or in participating in a conference hosted by Virginio Orsini, not only chief of the Colonnas’ hated rivals but great constable, general-in-chief, of the army of Naples. One wonders what France’s romantic young king would have thought had he known that Fabrizio, whom he was paying handsomely with money borrowed on onerous terms, was now promising that neither his clan nor its junior partners the Savelli family would do anything to make trouble for Naples or the Papal States when the French attack came.

  A plan of defense was agreed upon that day. Alfonso II’s son Ferrandino, who now bore his father’s old title of duke of Calabria, would take a Neapolitan army north into the Romagna to block the French from using the Apennine passes. Once in place, Ferrandino would also be positioned to protect the flank of Piero de’ Medici’s Florentine army as it sealed off the roads leading southward into Tuscany. Alfonso’s brother Don Fadrique, meanwhile, was to take Naples’s war fleet northward up the coast in an attack on the port of Genoa, to prevent the French from using it to supply and reinforce their army. Virginio Orsini assumed responsibility for keeping the French out of his family’s territories north of Rome, while Alexander was to do the same for those parts of the Papal States effectively under his rule.

  The army with which Charles VIII entered Italy at the start of September 1494, numbering possibly as many as forty thousand men, was an immense force not only by Italian standards but by the European standards of the time. It was a hard army too, made up mainly of Breton and Gascon veterans and Swiss and German mercenaries. Upon crossing the Alps they would find themselves scorned as barbarians, and they would repay the contempt of the Italians with the kind of atrocious savagery that had come to northern Europe in the time of the Hundred Years’ War. They brought with them something else that the Italians had never seen: mobile heavy artillery. It was hea
vy by the standards of the day, at any rate, the biggest barrels being all of eight feet long. Never before in history had it been possible to transport such devastating weaponry at the speed of a walking horse and use it to batter down the high, thick fortress walls that for millennia had been virtually impregnable.

  Precisely because it was so big and so awesomely equipped, Charles’s army had to do almost no real fighting. Its approach spread panic across the Lombard Plain and on southward, causing the forces mustered to resist its advance to move out of its path instead. This set off a sequence of betrayals, reversals, and defeats that threatened to go on until nothing of Italy’s old order remained. Events as they unfolded seemed almost to conspire to confirm Charles VIII’s fantasies about himself as an epic hero embarked upon God’s work and fulfilling his own magnificent destiny. His troops marched under standards bearing the words Voluntas Dei (By the Will of God) and Missus a Deo (Sent by God). These slogans were said to have been suggested by Giuliano della Rovere. He, like the king, saw impossible dreams coming true.

  That the arrival of the French marked the opening of a tragic new era in Italian history was clear from the beginning. When the fleet commanded by Don Fadrique of Naples arrived too late to keep Genoa’s harbor out of the hands of a French force led by Charles VIII’s cousin Louis of Orléans, it moved on to the port of Rapallo and linked up with friendly local forces there. Just days later, however, the arrival of 2,500 of Charles’s Swiss mercenaries forced Don Fadrique to withdraw, leaving Rapallo’s garrison to be massacred and the town itself to be sacked so savagely that news of what had happened spread terror to the farthest reaches of Italy. War Italian style, in which captured towns were more likely to be ransomed than destroyed and condottieri tended to be forgiving of defeated foes because they knew that in the next little war the shoe might well turn up on the other foot, was consigned to the past.

  On September 9 Charles reached the Lombard city of Asti, which had been a French outpost since being given to Louis of Orléans’s grandfather as part of the dowry of his bride Valentina Visconti. After receiving a warm welcome from Ludovico Sforza and his father-in-law Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara, Charles fell ill with smallpox. Though his case proved to be not fatal, it brought the offensive to another halt and so alarmed his court as to resurrect the old question of whether it was sensible to proceed all the way to Naples and expect that once there the French would be capable of overcoming Alfonso II’s defenses. There was talk of how much easier and more profitable it could be to simply take Milan instead. The duchy already was, after all, virtually in French hands, and every lawyer at the French court eagerly agreed that it belonged by right to Louis of Orléans, who was conveniently on the scene as one of Charles VIII’s senior commanders. Though Charles when sufficiently recovered dismissed such talk out of hand—probably he really did expect his campaign to continue until he sat on a throne in Jerusalem—Il Moro inevitably learned of it and was understandably distressed. He began to have belated second thoughts about having enticed the French to come to Italy and solve his problems.

  He was given further cause for worry when Charles moved on to Pavia, second only to the city of Milan as a bastion of Visconti-Sforza strength and home of Duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza, his wife Isabella of Aragon, and their young children. The king called on the duke, who as it happened was his first cousin (their mothers were daughters of the duke of Savoy) and in his usual bad health. Duchess Isabella took the initiative, throwing herself on the king’s mercy and begging him to assure the succession of her son Francesco if his father died. Charles, who had more than the average man’s susceptibility to women as beautiful as Isabella, responded sympathetically. Though he promised nothing before moving on again, this time to Parma, Il Moro was left to brood in solitude about just how dependable a patron the king of France was likely to prove.

  Charles resumed his effortless progress, with nothing to worry him except the costs of keeping his immense army paid, fed, and in tolerably good order. As city after city opened its gates without even a pretense of resistance, and in each new place Charles’s scouts marked the buildings where troops were to be billeted, it began to be said that the king was conquering Italy with a piece of chalk. The juggernaut rolled on, and as effortless victories followed one after another, the defensive confederation formed at Vicovaro began to crumble. Betrayals of Alexander and Alfonso came almost weekly. As early as September 18, when the French court was still at Asti awaiting the king’s recovery from smallpox, the Colonna had broken their chief’s promise to remain on the sidelines of the conflict at least where papal and Neapolitan territory were concerned. The cousins Fabrizio and Prospero Colonna launched a surprise attack on the Roman port of Ostia, which they had been forced to hand over to the pope earlier in the year after its governor, their patron Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, departed for France. By retaking Ostia they gave France’s warships control of the Tiber, without which Rome had no easy access to the sea. As they already controlled the main road connecting Rome to Naples, holding it in readiness for the French while blocking communications between Alexander and Alfonso, the Colonna now had the Vatican in a stranglehold.

  If it is true as alleged that Ascanio Sforza persuaded the Colonna to commit this act of betrayal, the cardinal deserves credit for a tactical masterstroke. With the Colonna now positioned to do so much mischief so close to his kingdom, Alfonso II decided that he could not reinforce his son Ferrandino’s army in the Romagna. This left Ferrandino without the strength to keep the French from outflanking his army and seizing the mountain passes, and when this happened the Neapolitan army was so dangerously exposed that Alfonso ordered a general retreat. Thus the Florentines found themselves unsupported as the French bore down on them. Every setback seemed to lead to further setbacks, and the French flags flying over Ostia seemed to mock a humiliated and defenseless Pope Alexander.

  Not even Ludovico Sforza could rejoice in the successes of the invasion he had instigated. When his nephew Duke Gian Galeazzo died on October 22, murder was so widely assumed that he found it necessary to send letters to his fellow princes, protesting his innocence. A supine Milanese parliament decreed that Ludovico and not Gian Galeazzo’s son Francesco was now duke, but the dire circumstances must have made this fulfillment of Il Moro’s lifelong dream much less sweet than he had expected.

  In Florence, weakened by a long and inconclusive war to subdue the neighboring city of Pisa, Piero de’ Medici had even more to worry about than Il Moro. His decision to side with Naples in this crisis had been a reversal of long-standing Florentine policy, which traditionally favored France as a rich market for the city’s bankers and manufacturers. The new alignment came under increasing criticism as France imposed an embargo on Florence’s goods, causing immediate economic distress. As the French army approached, more and more influential Florentines openly questioned Piero’s judgment, questioning also the wisdom of leaving the city’s destiny in the hands of an inexperienced youth who, it was becoming obvious, was not nearly the equal of his late father Lorenzo. Piero’s position became alarming when news arrived that Charles’s mercenaries, having used false promises to extract a surrender from the defenders of the Florentine stronghold of Fivizzano, had put the entire garrison to death and subjected the town to the kind of scorched-earth sacking for which Rapallo had first made them notorious. Florence seemed doomed to a similar fate, with Piero responsible.

  Perhaps it was sheer desperation, or perhaps the memory of how Lorenzo the Magnificent had once saved Florence by journeying to Naples and putting himself at the mercy of the vicious Ferrante, that prompted Piero to venture forth in search of the French king. He found him at the end of October, at Sarzana near the port of La Spezia. Instead of talking terms as his father surely would have done, however, Piero simply prostrated himself before the misshapen little conqueror. He abjectly declared himself ready not only to ally with the invaders but to hand over to them much more than they would have been likely to demand of a less
craven envoy. By the time Piero stopped talking, he had given Charles free access to Florence itself and every one of the city’s satellite strongpoints. He had even given Charles the strategic port of Livorno and, more shocking still, the city of Pisa, the control of which was considered economically and militarily essential by many leading Florentines. When the citizens of Florence learned of all this, their festering resentments, the inevitable result of generations of domination by a single family, erupted in communal rage.

  Their anger was brought to white heat by the denunciations of an extraordinary figure who, though an outsider who had moved to Florence only five years earlier and had done so at the invitation of Lorenzo de’ Medici, had already established himself as the spokesman and de facto leader of the city’s numerous anti-Medici factions. This was Friar Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican priest and preacher whose energy and charisma were fueled by revulsion against the hedonism and materialism of the Italy of his day, a burning hatred of the Medici and the Renaissance papacy alike, and (his most attractive feature) a conviction that Italy’s people could and should rid themselves of rule by tyrants.

  On the momentous day of November 9, 1494, when Piero de’ Medici and his family were expelled from Florence, Savonarola was not present. Instead he was in Pisa, where he had gone to represent the signoria of a new Florentine republic in welcoming the French invaders. Charles VIII was received as a liberator when he entered Pisa at the head of his army that day; the Pisans were in ecstasies at having been freed—or so they believed—from Florence’s hard rule. Rather oddly, the envoy from Florence figured prominently in the festivities and took the opportunity to heap praise on the conqueror from the north. Charles, Savonarola declared, was the liberator whose arrival he had been predicting in his sermons, a messenger sent by God to cleanse Italy—wicked Florence especially, the papacy above all—of the corruption in which it had long been sunk. Of course he got an affectionate response from king and Pisans alike and upon returning to Florence was himself received as a hero, the man whose prophecies had proved accurate and who had restored both the city’s dignity and its old friendship with France.