The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  Though units of the French army were inside the walls of Rome by December 27, Charles delayed his own entry until New Year’s Eve, a day approved by his astrologers. Led by 2,500 nobles on horseback, the great army arrived at the Porta del Popolo at the north end of the city at three in the afternoon and continued to stream through the gates until nine that night. The people of the city looked on in wonder as, hour after hour, they were passed by foot soldiers and cavalry from Switzerland and Germany, from Brittany and Gascony, and by dozens of horse-drawn guns. At the king’s side rode Cardinals Ascanio Sforza and Giuliano della Rovere, and immediately behind them came Cardinals Colonna and Savelli, members of two of the baronial clans that had abandoned the pope and entered the service of the French. Crowds that at first had gathered out of simple curiosity were soon swept up by the spectacle, shouting “Francia! Francia!” and “Colonna! Colonna!” What had to be most bitter to Pope Alexander, if he could hear it from his perch high in the Castel, they also shouted “Vincoli! Vincoli!” This was a salute to the man most unalterably committed to the Borgia pope’s destruction, Giuliano della Rovere, cardinal of Rome’s San Pietro in Vincoli Church. Hearing his companions saluted in this way must have confirmed for Charles that he had allied himself with the right faction of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

  As he commandeered for a headquarters Rome’s most magnificent residence, the Palazzo San Marco that had once been the home of Pope Paul II and now belonged to his nephew Cardinal Marco Barbo, Charles released his troops to pillage the part of the city that lay across the river from the Vatican. The palaces of cardinals who had not declared their support of the invasion became prime targets, and the homes of a number of Borgias—Cesare and Lucrezia’s mother included—were stripped bare. Alexander meanwhile made no effort to see the king. He sent three cardinals in his place, instructing them to point out to Charles the advantages of doing business with a sitting pope rather than trying to put a new one in his place. He empowered them to agree to any arrangement that left him secure in the Vatican and did not recognize Charles as king of Naples.

  Charles at this point saw no need to concede anything and was encouraged to think so by the eight cardinals now attached to his court. With a decree for Alexander’s deposition already drawn up and ready for his signature, he gave Alexander’s envoys a set of demands to carry back to the Vatican. The pope, if he wanted talks, would first have to surrender the Castel Sant’Angelo, his only defensible stronghold. He would also have to hand over his prisoner Cem, the brother of Ottoman sultan Bayezid II, a valuable hostage and a potent symbol of resistance to the sultan’s rule. Finally, Alexander was instructed to assign Cardinal Cesare Borgia as legate to the French court; obviously this meant surrendering Cesare as a hostage. Charles must have been taken aback when the pope, from where he was holed up in the Castel with Cem, a small group of cardinals including Cesare, and a company of troops, rejected every one of his demands out of hand. If the splendor of his entry into Europe’s most fabled city had encouraged the king to think that the pope was his to command, he was being disabused.

  During the standoff that ensued, Charles amused himself with visits to the principal churches and pilgrimage sites of Rome. Though his commanders set up gallows in public places as a caution to their troops to control themselves, the soldiers largely ignored them, regarding the right to pillage as one of the fringe benefits of their trade. Some of the French cannons were hauled up within range of the Castel but stood ominously quiet. The pope’s show of defiance took on a farcical note when, without a shot having been fired, a section of the Castel’s massive but decayed outer wall spontaneously collapsed into the Tiber, opening a hole through which the French could almost certainly have forced their way. Instead, however, king and pope began to negotiate through intermediaries and by mid-January came to an understanding. Charles got things that Alexander had no way of denying him: freedom of passage through the Papal States and possession of the papal fortresses at Civitavecchia, Terracina, Viterbo, and Spoleto. Additionally, Alexander agreed to hand over Prince Cem—but only on condition that he and not Charles would continue to receive the forty thousand ducats that the Ottoman sultan paid annually to prevent his brother from being set free. Charles wanted the prince as a trophy, evidently—one whom he could put on display when he set out to conquer Constantinople. Alexander agreed also to send Cesare to Charles as a legate-hostage. More significant were the things that Charles did not get: surrender of the Castel, recognition of himself as king of Naples, or a repudiation of the kingship of Alfonso II. The one bitter pill the pope had to swallow was the king’s demand that all the cardinals who had supported him in his invasion be granted amnesty, including the restoration of their property and offices. In context, however, this was of limited importance. It was made easier by the fact that Alexander was throughout his life a forgiving rather than a vindictive man.

  Charles now abandoned all thought of deposing Alexander or trying to curtail the powers that had come to him with the papal crown. Instead he became intent on showing himself to be the pope’s faithful subject. The two met for the first time the day after the terms of their agreement were settled, and they did so in a theatrical fashion that had been carefully choreographed in advance. It was arranged that the pope would be carried in a sedan chair from the Castel to the Vatican gardens, where Charles would come upon him, supposedly deep in prayer. Charles would then fall to one knee not once but repeatedly, his third genuflection serving as Alexander’s cue to take notice, raise him to his feet, and greet him as a son. Whereupon, also by prearrangement, Charles would ask that his chief minister Briçonnet be made a cardinal, Alexander would not only agree but invite Charles to come live in the Vatican, and their reconciliation would be complete.

  All went according to the script, and with Charles now under his roof the pope had time to apply the full force of his charm to the cementing of their friendship. He was, as usual, successful. When even the king’s appearance at consistory and direct appeal failed to win a promise of recognition, he nevertheless remained in thrall to his host. He lowered himself to the floor, kissed Alexander’s foot, and said he had come to Rome “to offer obedience and homage to your Holiness, as my predecessors the kings of France had done before me.” A member of his entourage, the president of the parlement of France, then read out a declaration that Charles acknowledged Alexander to be Christ’s vicar on earth and the successor to Saint Peter. The king’s reward for thus freeing Alexander from the greatest danger facing him was, by comparison, rather paltry. The only addition to the things that the pope had conceded before their meeting was another French seat in the College of Cardinals, a red hat for Charles’s cousin Philip of Luxembourg.

  It was enough. In the days following, Alexander and Charles were together almost constantly, touring the city on horseback and giving no evidence of disagreeing about anything. The cardinals who had ridden into Rome as part of the king’s entourage, by contrast, were left to absorb the bewildering fact that they had been, if not exactly betrayed, inexplicably denied the great prizes that had seemed within their grasp. An exasperated Ascanio Sforza departed for Milan as soon as he saw that Charles and the pope had settled their differences. Giuliano della Rovere remained in Rome, but only in the hope that something might still be salvaged from the wreckage of his dreams.

  When Charles departed for Naples on January 28, taking Prince Cem, Cesare Borgia, and Cardinal della Rovere with him, he had nothing to show for his weeks in Rome except the two hostages and a promise of unimpeded passage through the Papal States that his big army would have been perfectly capable of doing without. The main part of that army had been preceded out of Rome by an advance force under the command of the condottiere Fabrizio Colonna, whose path took him first through territories belonging to various branches of his family and then into the Abruzzi region. Now he was on Neapolitan ground, but even here he encountered no significant resistance. The local barons, with their memories of two generations of abuse a
t the hands of Alfonso II and his father Ferrante, could not have been less interested in fighting to defend the House of Aragon. Any who might have been so inclined were cowed not only by the size of the invasion force but by fast-spreading reports of how, throughout their long advance, King Charles’s troops had shown themselves prepared to employ mass murder wherever they met with even the threat of opposition.

  The town of L’Aquila, upon learning of the approach of Fabrizio Colonna, opened its gates and hoisted a French flag. Sulmona did the same, and then Popoli. Soon the whole of Il Regno was in turmoil, with the lords of town after town declaring themselves faithful to the French crown. King Alfonso, an experienced soldier and the one man to whom every Neapolitan soldier looked for leadership, went almost catatonic with fear. A legend would arise to the effect that he was haunted at night by visions of the countless people he had destroyed in the course of his ignoble career and sank into a slough of remorse. He roused himself enough not to rally his troops but to have a flotilla of galleys loaded with as many of his treasures as could be crammed aboard, at which point he abdicated in favor of his son Ferrandino and sailed away to Sicily, a safe haven securely in the hands of Spain. His departure came five days before Charles so much as left Rome. The twenty-five-year-old Ferrandino, who gave promise of being a better man and king than his father or grandfather, threw himself into organizing a defense. At every step he found his efforts impeded by the hatred of his subjects for the dynasty he now headed.

  Charles, on his second night out of Rome, halted at the town of Velletri in the Alban Hills. Upon awaking the next morning, he and his entourage discovered that Cesare was nowhere to be found. They eventually learned that a local nobleman had shown him a secret passageway out of the rocca and that he had slipped away in the middle of the night disguised as a stableboy. The escape, an early expression of Cesare’s inability to be submissive to anyone, violated the terms of the pope’s agreement with the king. Horsemen carried complaints back to Alexander, who responded with profuse apologies and assurances that he was no less surprised than Charles and had no idea where Cesare might be. (In fact he had gone to Spoleto and would quietly remain there for almost two months.) King Charles’s men fell greedily upon the wagons containing the baggage that Cesare had brought with him from Rome. They discovered to their disgust that they had been tricked yet again: under their rich coverings the wagons were heaped with rubbish.

  The king was still at Velletri when envoys of Spain rode into his encampment and demanded an audience. Ferdinand by this point was deeply uneasy about the dispatches he was receiving from Italy and had run out of patience. He could never have accepted a restoration of French rule in Naples and had been so taken aback at the ease with which Charles VIII was bringing all Italy to its knees that he was now transferring troops from Spain to Sicily with instructions to make ready for action on the mainland. What his ambassadors delivered at Velletri was a stern warning for Charles: his campaign was in violation of the Treaty of Barcelona, which reserved to Spain the right to protect the Papal States. They demanded that the port of Ostia be restored to Alexander, that Cesare Borgia be released (not knowing that the young cardinal had seen to that himself), and that the advance on Naples be brought to an immediate halt. When Charles made it clear that he took none of this seriously, his visitors tore up their copy of the Barcelona pact and threw it at his feet. The chronicles tell us that “high words” were exchanged before their departure.

  And so Charles resumed his southward journey, his army continuing to meet with no serious resistance but spreading devastation everywhere it went. He allowed the Colonna to use the troops for which he was paying to lay waste to the fortresses, homes, and orchards of their old enemies the Conti. His mercenaries continued to take looting and rapine as their right. When the rocca at San Giovanni was annoyingly slow to submit, its garrison of almost nine hundred men was put to the sword, the town burned to the ground. The new King Ferrandino, having had no time for a coronation, was attempting to form a line of defense at Capua when reports of a revolt in his capital obliged him to gallop off to the south. As soon as he was out of sight, Capua surrendered to the invaders, and Gaeta did the same three days later. Ferrandino returned on February 21. Finding Capua in enemy hands, and no support anywhere, he accepted the hopelessness of the situation and took ship for the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. Soon thereafter he was with his father in Sicily, having taken his half-sister Sancia and her husband Jofrè Borgia with him. Within twenty-four hours of his flight Charles VIII passed in triumph through the gates of Naples, where he was welcomed by cheering crowds. They hailed him for delivering the city from decades of tyranny and terror. And his arrival was, in its way, an extraordinary achievement. He had taken possession of the largest state in Italy, long one of the richest and most powerful in all Europe, without having to fight a single battle worthy of the name, almost without having to fire a round from one of his great brass guns. Italy had collapsed at his feet like a house of cards.

  Cem, who had ridden into Naples just behind the king, a living symbol of the crusade against his brother that supposedly lay just ahead, was found dead in his bed three days later. Years later, when the campaign to demolish the reputation of the Borgias was fully under way and no rumor was too outlandish to be set down in print, it would be alleged that the prince, who at the time of his death had been a pampered prisoner for some thirteen years, must have been poisoned. And that the poisoner could of course have been none other than Alexander VI—who else? If reminded that Cem had died approximately one month after the pope handed him over to the French, the accusers would respond that obviously the Borgias possessed the secret of some delayed-action poison, some concoction capable of suddenly felling its victims weeks after being ingested.

  In fact it is not at all unlikely that Cem died of natural causes, having lived a life of relentless self-indulgence throughout his captivity. His death, far from benefiting the pope, deprived the pope not only of an enormous annual stipend but of a powerful diplomatic weapon, one that even in French hands could have been used to threaten the Ottoman sultan and keep his aggressions in check. The only European prince who could possibly have wanted that death was the king who had taken Cem to Naples and in whose custody the prince had spent his last weeks. Cem was to have been the figurehead behind which Charles would lead his assault on the Turks—assuming that Charles still wanted to push on to Jerusalem.

  That was not an entirely safe assumption. Cem’s corpse was barely cold before Charles announced that the crusade would have to be called off. The pope’s response to this change of plans was interesting: he authorized Ferdinand of Spain to impose a special tax on church properties within his domains, in order to build ships to be used against the Turks. This was probably an oblique rebuke to Charles VIII for abandoning the great purpose that supposedly had taken him to Naples. It may also have been a way of helping Ferdinand to muster the resources needed for war with France.

  Over the next three months Charles VIII earned the contempt in which he has ever since been held. Having been received as a hero by the people and nobility of Naples, he proceeded in an impressively short time to alienate virtually all of his new subjects. Having brought Italy to its knees, he then conducted himself so atrociously as to provoke the states he had so easily subdued to take up arms. He surrendered to the seductions of a licentious Neapolitan capital and a glorious Neapolitan spring, wallowing in the pleasures of the flesh while his troops preyed on a helpless population and the hundreds of French nobles in his entourage treated themselves to every office, title, and estate they could find an excuse to claim. As outrage followed outrage, Naples’s joy at the fall of the House of Aragon turned first to annoyance and then into smoldering rage. In due course it burst into flame as the Neapolitans became determined to rid themselves of the intruders.

  Charles, blissfully distracted, remained oblivious. Ferdinand of Spain meanwhile had ambassadors at all the major capitals, and under his ins
tructions they encouraged the various princes to imagine the consequences of a continued French presence in Italy and to understand that such a fate was not inevitable. Milan was receptive, Ludovico Sforza needing no one to tell him that he had blundered, and the Venetians were aware by now that what had happened to Naples could happen to them as well. Even in faraway England, King Henry VII was prepared to contribute to keeping France from growing stronger than it already was, and Maximilian of Hapsburg had not only the Holy Roman Empire to protect from France but a deep personal grudge dating back to the time when Charles had simultaneously jilted his daughter and stolen his fiancée, depriving him of the great duchy of Brittany. As for the pope, his position could not have been clearer; he was the only leader in Italy neither to have thrown himself at Charles’s feet nor to have fled at the approach of his army. When in March a congress was convened in Venice, all of the above attended or sent representatives. In short order they formed what they named their Holy League. Its members pledged to remain allied for twenty-five years—not one of them could have thought that possible—and to contribute thousands of troops to the formation of an army the sole purpose of which would be to drive the French back to France.

  Charles, convinced by his successes that he was invincible, was slow to awaken to what was happening. His only political interest at this point was the old one of getting the pope to invest him with his new crown. When a new round of appeals proved as futile as the ones he had made personally while in Rome, and when the things he offered in return for investiture grew more and more lavish but still produced no response, the realization finally dawned that his position was not as solid as he had supposed. His initial response was not, however, either to reinforce that position or to prepare for an orderly withdrawal. Instead he staged an elaborate ceremony at the Naples cathedral at which, to the acclaim of nobody except his own hangers-on, he crowned himself as monarch of Il Regno and “Emperor of the East.” Even he was beginning to have some sense of the growing dangers of his situation, however, and to see the absurdity of his self-coronation. He sent ambassadors to Rome with an offer he hoped would be impossible to refuse. In return for cooperating, Alexander would receive an annual tribute of fifty thousand ducats, repayment of the hundred thousand ducats that Naples had owed to the Vatican since the time of Ferrante and Alfonso II, and the promise of a French-led crusade against the Turks. Alexander’s refusal made it impossible to doubt that, with all the Italian states now rallying against him, Charles was no longer safe so far from home. Preparations began, in haste, for an escape.