The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  When on November 17 Charles rode into Florence with Cardinal della Rovere at his side, they received a more mixed reception. Supporters of the Medici, especially those who resented what almost everyone was interpreting as Charles’s intervention on behalf of Pisan autonomy, looked on sullenly. But those who regarded the Medici as usurping tyrants, and Piero as a disaster, were jubilant at what they hoped would prove the dawning of a new era. Their joy was tamped down, however, when Charles revealed where his priorities lay. He told the assembled citizens that he had entered their city not as a liberator but as a conqueror, that it was a matter of no interest to him whether they were governed by the Medici or the foes of the Medici, and that what he wanted from them was what Florence had a gift for producing in abundance: money.

  Charles’s position, however, proved to be not as strong as he had assumed. The sum that he demanded was so outlandish that the Florentine officials all but laughed in his face, and when he threatened to use force (“I shall sound my trumpets!”), they dared him to try (“We will ring our bells!” meaning that they would summon the people to resist). The plain fact was that Charles needed an intact and nonhostile Florence: the city lay athwart the lines of communication connecting him with the coast and with home, and if it took up arms against him, his army could be cut off. If he destroyed Florence, he would destroy with it the banking houses without which his whole enterprise might very well be doomed. And so he backed down, providing a clue as to how easily he might have been stopped if Venice, Ferrara, and Bologna had joined the resistance at the start. He accepted payment of 120,000 florins, recognized the new regime, and moved on.

  Now it was the turn of Ludovico Sforza to turn traitor. Early in November, having learned that Louis of Orléans was sporting the title duke of Milan as he advanced with his troops southward toward Naples, Il Moro decided that enough was enough. He quietly dispatched his brother the cardinal to call on Pope Alexander in Rome and offer an alliance. Implicit in this, obviously, was a Milanese abandonment of Charles of France. Unfortunately for himself, however, Il Moro mistakenly believed his own position to be so strong, or the pope’s so hopeless, that he could exact an extortionate price for changing sides. On his behalf Ascanio demanded Alexander’s pledge that all future appointments to the College of Cardinals would require the duke of Milan’s approval. The pope’s response was as bold as the demand: he had Ascanio locked up.

  Where were Ferdinand and Isabella while all this was transpiring? They were, in spite of the pleas for help from Alfonso of Naples and from the pope as well, in spite of their own horror at the thought of a French conquest of Naples, carefully saying and doing nothing. The only possible explanation is the Treaty of Barcelona by which Charles had bought their neutrality, surrendering two border provinces that his father had struggled mightily to make part of France. The Spanish monarchs had no wish to jeopardize such lovely acquisitions. For the time being they were satisfied to stand by, wait to see what happened, and leave both their old friend the pope and their cousin the king of Naples to manage as best they could.

  Alexander expressed his view of the situation on November 9, in words of reproach addressed to Ercole d’Este’s ambassador to the papal court. “The triumph of France,” he said, “involves nothing less than the destruction of the independence of every state in Italy.” Rome itself included, of course. But Ferrara included as well, even if Duke Ercole had put himself unreservedly on France’s side. That was what the pope saw: that in this squalid affair there could be no Italian winners. Knowing that even Ludovico Sforza had grasped the truth, he probably knew also that Venice was awakening to how, by electing to remain neutral, it had jeopardized its own future.

  Probably the blindest man in Italy was its new master, Charles VIII. His unimpeded progress made it unnecessary for him to see that his own high-handedness, and even more the brutality with which his troops were looting and raping as they worked their way south, were making enemies even of those who at first had welcomed him. Before leaving Florence he had issued a grandiose manifesto, declaring that his purpose was to recapture the Holy Land and end the Ottoman threat to Christendom, and that the conquest of Naples was a necessary and legitimate step in the achievement of those epic goals. Also necessary, he noted, was that the pope “grant us the same courtesy he has granted to our enemies, that is to say free passage through his territories, and the necessary provisioning, to be paid for by us.”

  The subtext was unmistakable: he, King Charles, was an eminently reasonable man who wanted only what was fair, and if the pope knew what was good for him, he would be reasonable too. The king was finding reasonable people everywhere he went. Viterbo surrendered to him without a murmur of complaint. Siena did the same. Montefeltro of Urbino declared that he too was the king’s man, as did, finally, Giovanni Bentivoglio of Bologna. When the pope sent envoys, Charles refused to see them. He saw no need to negotiate with anyone.

  Alexander sat alone in Rome, without options. When an opportunity arose to have Prospero Colonna taken into custody and imprisoned, he quickly seized it. It has been speculated that he hoped this act, by sparking an uprising in Ostia, would lead to the recovery of that crucial coastal city. Nothing of the kind happened, however, and the pope remained as isolated and without prospects as before.

  At the beginning of December Ludovico Sforza was visited by envoys from Venice, sent to make certain that he understood just how dangerous the situation now was and to urge him to consider his next steps. A report on the meeting includes the Venetians’ verbatim account of what Il Moro had to say. It shows him to be deeply disillusioned and resolved to contribute what he can to sending the French back to France. Charles, he says, is “young and of poor judgment; he is not advised as he ought to be … The king is haughty and ambitious beyond all imagining; and he has esteem for no one … How should we have confidence in him? He has been guilty of so many cruelties and has behaved with such insolence in all those of our territories through which he has passed, that the moment cannot come quickly enough of his leaving our territory. They are evil men, and we must do all possible not to have them in our country.” He claims to be encouraging the pope to stand firm, and to be assuring Alfonso II that if he can hold out for two more months, the offensive will collapse for want of funds.

  For him and for everyone involved in this fiasco, the worst still lay ahead. On December 17 Alexander was subjected to a fresh betrayal and his worst humiliation yet. It happened at the town of Nepi, not far north of Virginio Orsini’s stronghold of Bracciano. As King Charles approached, he was met by Virginio’s illegitimate son Carlo, sent to put the whole of the Orsini holdings, Bracciano and other fortresses included, at the disposal of the invaders. Thus the man who at Vicovaro had agreed to stand shoulder to shoulder with the pope so as to seal off the way to Rome was not only abandoning his ally but reinforcing the invader he had pledged to fight. Charles must have been delighted to make Bracciano his latest headquarters. Virginio for his part took off for Naples and—incredibly—continued employment as Alfonso II’s grand constable.

  Ten days later the French occupied Civitavecchia, Rome’s only link to the sea since the fall of Ostia. By December 18 the whole papal court had been packed for flight, the Vatican’s treasures locked away in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Almost at the hour of departure, however, Alexander decided not to go. In the days following he was joined by Ferrandino, Alfonso II’s resourceful young son, who had an army camped just outside the city walls and was making ready to stand and fight. But on Christmas Day, after formally investing Ferrandino with the dukedom of Calabria as a gesture of gratitude and admiration, Alexander asked him to return to Naples forthwith and take his soldiers with him.

  Ferrandino was furious. He thought that the pope too was defecting to the French. But Alexander insisted; there was no possibility of holding off Charles’s huge army, now nearly within sight of the hills of Rome, and any effort to do so was likely to result in the destruction of the city.

  So
Ferrandino grudgingly departed. Alexander opened the doors of his prison, releasing Ascanio Sforza and Prospero Colonna among others. In company with those cardinals who had remained loyal, a cadre of trusted Spanish guards, and the Ottoman prince Cem, he settled down behind the walls of the Castel to await the arrival of the French.

  If attacked, he told the departing Prospero, he intended to fight.

  Background

  FLORENCE: AN ANTI-RENAISSANCE

  WHAT THE PHYSICISTS TELL US ABOUT EVERY ACTION HAVING an equal and opposite reaction proved to be relevant to politics in the time of Charles VIII’s invasion. It found expression in the uniquely glorious city-state of Florence, which not only expelled the family that had provided its leaders for sixty years but cast aside some of the values of the Renaissance to which it more than any other place had given birth. It did these things in the course of throwing itself at the feet of a charismatic friar whom most people today would regard as not only a fanatic but seriously unbalanced.

  That friar, a brilliantly gifted preacher who if not for the extremes to which he finally went might be remembered as one of the heroic figures of his time, was the same Girolamo Savonarola who had represented the new post-Medici government of Florence in welcoming King Charles at Pisa. He was not Florentine or even Tuscan by birth but a native of Ferrara, where life under the Este dukes instilled in him something close to hatred for warlord princes and their ways. He gave early evidence of being unable to accept ordinary human frailty: in 1475, after running off to enter a monastery in Bologna, he wrote to his physician father to explain that he “could not endure the corruption of the Italian people.”

  After rising to become his friary’s novicemaster he was sent out as an itinerant preacher, which proved to be the perfect application of his gifts. Though short and thin and rather ugly with his great beak of a nose, from the pulpit he radiated extraordinary power. His appeal grew out of the passionate conviction with which he spoke, and his use of a direct, colloquial style devoid of the polished and formal rhetoric taught at the universities of the time. His travels took him to Florence in the early 1480s, but whatever his message was at that point, the sophisticated Florentines found little of interest in it. Having fallen flat, he moved on.

  When he was thirty-seven, Savonarola was heard speaking by the philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Impressed with what the friar had to say about the need for reform of both the Church and civic life, Pico wrote to Lorenzo de’ Medici reporting that he had discovered a jewel, a man so electrifying that he should be persuaded to take up residence in Florence. Lorenzo, barely forty years old but in his twentieth year as de facto head of the Florentine state, acted on his friend’s suggestion. Thus it became the supreme irony of Lorenzo’s life that at his initiative Florence became the home of the man destined to bring the long rule of his family to an end and undo, if temporarily, much of his life’s work.

  The Florence that welcomed Savonarola back in 1489 was fully formed physically and culturally, already the beautiful place that today draws millions of visitors from around the world and home to an extraordinary assortment of artists and thinkers. Though the Tuscan hills in which the city is set have few natural resources and are not nearly as fruitful as the flatlands of Lombardy to the north, over the centuries the enterprising Florentines had become pioneers in the manufacture of cloth (an industry employing fully a third of the city’s population) as well as in banking and trade. Its merchants introduced Arabic numerals to the West, and the innovations of its bankers included international letters of credit and Europe’s first gold currency. Florence’s little coins, called florins, each contained precisely seventy-two grains of gold and became the preferred medium of exchange throughout Europe. When the Venetians began producing the ducat, they made them identical to the florin in gold content and therefore interchangeable with them. Other states followed suit in introducing their own gold coins.

  Experience in commerce taught the Florentines the value of prudence, precision, and a reputation for honesty, and so simple self-interest caused them to become a prudent, precise, and honest people. In the Middle Ages, once they had fought free of the Holy Roman emperors, they established republican institutions in which all members of the various trade and professional guilds had the rights of citizens, guild membership was open to qualified newcomers, and membership in the governing group known as the signoria was chosen by lot every two months. Florence’s feudal nobility, meanwhile, was denied citizenship and thereby neutered politically. The resulting regime was far from being a utopia; slavery was lawful, only a minority of adult males were guild members and therefore citizens, and bloodshed was all too common as family fought family for advantage or on points of honor. But as the fifteenth century advanced, Florence remained one of the few republics not to fall under the control of tyrannical warlord clans. Instead, as a kind of evolving compromise made necessary by the need for continuity and a strong executive, the city’s political institutions gradually subordinated themselves first to a wily banker named Cosimo de’ Medici, then to his son Piero from 1464 to 1469, and thereafter to Piero’s son Lorenzo.

  The wealth, worldliness, and fixation on classical culture that Savonarola encountered upon returning to Florence were all, in his eyes, symptoms of moral rot. The ethical and sexual standards of a pleasure-seeking population he saw as decadence. His call for a purifying of the whole culture, delivered in an earnest and plainspoken style that was a novelty in a time of preachers and orators schooled in classical rhetoric, began to attract large and receptive audiences. Success increased the vehemence of his pronouncements, and his condemnation of the world he saw around him grew more and more extreme. No doubt encouraged by the rivals of the Medici, he blamed Lorenzo for the paganism into which Florence, he said, had fallen. He predicted that not only Lorenzo but also Pope Innocent and Ferrante of Naples would soon be in hell. When the first two expired in 1492 and Ferrante followed in 1494, Savonarola’s credibility was vastly enhanced. He prophesied also that God would soon send a great power to purge Italy and the Church, and when Charles VIII’s army came down out of the alpine passes, the credulous were convinced that the friar did indeed speak for the Almighty. When Piero de’ Medici’s abject submission to Charles of France caused him and his family to be sent fleeing from their home, it was Savonarola who got the credit for saving Florence from destruction. His popularity rose to such frenzied heights that the entire state was his to command. The young Michelangelo heard him speak and was as impressed as everyone else. Half a century later he would say that he could still hear Savonarola’s words ringing in his ears.

  The friar was not a charlatan or a hypocrite and by no means an entirely bad man. He was not an enemy of classical learning to the same extent as, say, the English Puritans of a century later; those zealots would have burned the great Medici library rather than taking pains, as Savonarola did, to save it from the French. They certainly never would have approved his friendship with many of the city’s leading artists. Under Savonarola’s influence, Florence achieved something much closer to truly democratic government than had ever been possible under the Medici, and his reforms included such things as a cooperative lending society to protect people in need of credit from being exploited.

  But perhaps it is in the nature of such men to be drawn by their own success into increasingly extreme positions. Certainly it was in Savonarola’s nature. The things he would do in progressing from criticism of Rome to an attack on the legitimacy of the Church’s authority, and the way in which the pope responded, provide very nearly the best insight we have into just what kind of man Alexander VI was.

  13

  The French Depart

  The meeting of King Charles VIII and Pope Alexander VI, when it finally took place in Rome in the first week of January 1495, was an encounter in which all the important advantages appeared to lie on one side.

  Charles, for all his youth and inexperience and foolishness, was ruler of one of the two mightiest king
doms in Europe and in the preceding few months had made himself master of half of Italy as well. He commanded an army so fearsome that it had been obliged to fight no real battles as it worked its way down the peninsula; no one could see any point in attempting to stop it.

  Alexander by contrast had nothing with which to oppose the invaders except whatever value was to be found in the prestige of his ancient office. He had opened Rome’s gates to the French for the most practical of reasons: because in military terms he was powerless, utterly without means of defense. Aside from Ferrandino of Naples, every supposed friend with the capacity to provide help had either defected to the enemy or declared a neutrality that amounted to acceptance of French domination. His decision not to flee as Rome fell into the hands of a king committed to deposing him must have seemed an act less of courage than of madness—or perhaps of abject surrender.

  And yet the results of their encounter would demonstrate, as eloquently as anything in history, that brute power is not always everything. That there are times, even in the realm of international power politics, when a strong man can bend a weak man to his will even when he has few resources to draw on beyond the force of his own personality.