The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  It is remarkable, in light of his later conduct, how little attention Alexander gave, throughout the invasion crisis and its immediate aftermath, to the fortunes of his young relatives. That whole agenda appears to have been set aside. With the crisis behind him, however, he was freed to turn his attention to other matters, and the matters that interested him most were those young relatives and conditions in the Papal States. One thing in particular rankled, and it was an issue with deep roots: the power, and the troublesome behavior, of the Orsini. Though the Colonna had accepted employment with Gonsalvo and Ferrandino after being discharged by the retreating Charles VIII, and though they had been reconciled with Rome as a result, the old warhorse Virginio Orsini followed an insultingly different course. First he declined an offer to take command of the Holy League’s armies, possibly because accepting would have put him on the same side as the Colonna, more likely because he received a better offer from the count of Montpensier, the hard-pressed viceroy whom King Charles had left behind in Naples. Returning to Il Regno at the head of a force drawn from several branches of his family, Virginio settled in for what he undoubtedly hoped would be a long and lucrative conflict of the traditional Italian kind.

  What made all this intolerable from Alexander’s perspective was that Virginio, as lord of the great lakeside stronghold of Bracciano north of Rome, was a papal vassal and therefore—supposedly—subject to Rome. His flouting of his feudal obligations, if no more than typical of the high-handed manner in which the Roman barons had been dealing with their supposed overlords for centuries, served as a galling reminder of the disorder in the Papal States and even in the streets of Rome. Wherever the clans dominated there was thuggery instead of law, the caprices of autocrats rather than anything deserving to be called proper government. And Virginio was the whole problem personified.

  The papal army had deteriorated during the reign of Innocent VIII, and almost from the week of his election Alexander had begun spending to rebuild it. Later, drawing on the lessons of the invasion, he began investing in artillery. Thus he was prepared to take action when, early in 1496, he thought he saw an opportunity to break the Orsini once and for all. Undoubtedly he intended more than this; his ultimate objective could only have been to subdue all the baronial clans. But it would have been folly to take on all of them at once, and Virginio’s high-handed insolence made the Orsini the right place to start. Nor was this pope willing to follow the practice of his predecessors and use one local clan to subdue another; instead he summoned Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, son and successor of the great Duke Federico of Urbino, to take command of the papal troops. Guidobaldo was a safe choice: the domains he had inherited from his father were far away and separated from Rome by the Apennines, so distant that the thought of augmenting them with the lands of the Orsini could only have seemed absurd.

  At the same time Alexander sent word to Juan de Borja, the young duke of Gandía, urging him to hasten back to Italy from Spain, become Giovanni Borgia once again, and accept appointment as the Vatican’s captain-general. Alexander saw a double-barreled opportunity: a chance to neutralize the Orsini and raise the status of his own family at a single stroke. By merging the two objectives he put his reign on a momentously new course.

  Juan, whose late brother Pedro Luis had become the first duke of Gandía partly on the basis of his achievements as a soldier (his inherited wealth had also been a factor, along with Ferdinand and Isabella’s wish to bring him into the royal family by marrying him to their cousin), had no real military credentials of his own. Nevertheless the pope placed him rather than Montefeltro at the head of the campaign against the Orsini, and he can have had no other reason for doing so than the simple fact that Juan was a Borgia. Somebody loyal would be needed to manage the Orsini properties once they had been reclaimed, and Alexander decided to give that job to Juan as well. Who else, in the circus of Italian dynastic politics, could he possibly trust? Even within the family, who but Juan? Jofrè, even if he had been a stronger character, was too young to be a possibility. All the other male Borgias of note, Cesare included, were churchmen. The pope appears to have taken it for granted that the young duke had somehow grown up while in Spain or that, if he remained capable of atrociously immature behavior, that was somehow not going to matter.

  We see here the first clear manifestation of Alexander’s defining weakness as a man and as pontiff: his growing and soon all-but-unrestrained willingness to subordinate everything else to his favorites. No doubt he remembered how Calixtus III had turned to him and his brother under similar circumstances and had increased his effectiveness as pope by doing so. If the increasing extremes to which he carried his nepotism might to any extent be rationally explained, the explanation must surely have to do with the perception that Juan and his siblings, if empowered, could become Alexander’s most effective tools in the pursuit of his policy objectives.

  The war on the Orsini began in the south, before Juan’s arrival in Italy, and at the start it was impressively successful. This was thanks to the participation of Gonsalvo the Great Captain, who from his new base at Naples set out in pursuit of Virginio and the viceroy Montpensier. With characteristic energy he drove them from one redoubt to another until, by the end of June, he had them bottled up in the town of Atella in the southern province of Basilicata. After a month under siege Montpensier offered a deal: he would surrender if a relief force did not come to his rescue by the time another month had passed, with the understanding that he and his men would then be allowed to return to France. Meanwhile hostilities could cease. Gonsalvo, having provided an early demonstration of his ability to outthink, outmaneuver, and outfight the French as well as Virginio’s Italians, confident of his ability to deal with a relief force in the unlikely event that one appeared, was happy to agree. He was wise to do so: Montpensier, his troops ravaged by disease and desperately short of water, gave up halfway through the period of truce. Though Montpensier was set free as agreed (only to die shortly afterward), Pope Alexander sent an urgent appeal to Ferrandino not to let Virginio go. The king did as asked. Virginio, his son Gian Giordano, and a number of their kinsmen were held as prisoners.

  In Rome, meanwhile, a separate northern campaign was still being prepared. When Juan landed at Civitavecchia on the coast, he was escorted in state to Rome, where after a formal reception his brother Cardinal Cesare showed him to the apartments that had been prepared for him in the papal palace. Almost three more months passed before all was deemed to be in readiness. During those months Juan appears to have made himself generally despised, not least by his new comrades in arms. One of them would remember him as “a very mean young man, full of false ideas of grandeur and bad thoughts, haughty, cruel and unreasonable.” Virginio Orsini remained a prisoner in Naples, but his brother-in-law Bartolomeo d’Alviano managed to escape. He made his way northward to Virginio’s main stronghold of Bracciano, where he organized a defense against the assault that everyone knew to be impending.

  One wonders if Pope Alexander, usually so circumspect, gave any thought to the risks he was running in entrusting his campaign to the two young dukes—neither of them yet twenty-five, Juan barely twenty—who knelt before him on October 26 to receive his blessing and with it the command of the papal army. Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, heir to one of the greatest military names in Italy, was intelligent, refined, and civilized—an almost perfect Renaissance prince. He had limited experience of warfare, however, and time would show him to have few of his late father’s gifts. Only the belief that blood will out, that the apple never falls far from the tree, can explain his selection as second in command of the expedition that was about to begin. Juan himself, the newly anointed captain-general, had less experience than Guidobaldo and even less to recommend him. When he rode out of Rome that day at the head of his army, the banners of Church and pope unfurled above his head, he was utterly unprepared for what lay ahead.

  The question has to be asked: is it credible that Pope Alexander would have taken such a ri
sk for, bestowed so much favor on, not a son but a nephew only? Yes is the only possible answer—an unqualified yes. And the evidence is as simple as it is undeniable: the fact that so many of Alexander’s predecessors had done exactly the same thing. Sometimes the risk paid off handsomely; this was nowhere as true as in the case of Calixtus III and young Rodrigo Borgia. More often the results were catastrophic; for an example it is necessary to look no further back than to one of the popes Rodrigo served—to Sixtus IV and his nephew Girolamo.

  As for why, we have already considered how difficult it could be for a pope to find trustworthy agents, and how his own early life had been an object lesson in the potential value of papal nephews in consolidating the Vatican’s power and extending its reach. Beyond that, it is possible to suspect that even a man as robust as Alexander VI, without wife or children and perhaps susceptible to loneliness as old age descends upon him, might respond gratefully to the presence of four attractive and attentive young relatives at his court and in his life.

  In the early going, the two young dukes did well. In short order ten Orsini castles were taken, and the papal army continued to advance. As the end of the year approached, only three strongholds, all of them in the heart of Orsini country at Lake Bracciano, remained to be taken. Isola then fell, followed by Trevignano, so that only the majestically high-towered Bracciano Castle remained in Orsini hands. Virginio’s father Napoleone had strengthened and modernized this fortress in the 1480s, adapting it to withstand artillery. Now its defense was in the capable hands of Virginio’s sister Bartolomea d’Alviano and her husband Bartolomeo, an experienced soldier recently escaped from imprisonment in Naples and now acting as the family’s de facto military chief. Their ability to hold out was in doubt, however, until in the depths of winter help suddenly arrived in the form of troops led by Virginio’s illegitimate son Carlo, his cousin Giulio Orsini, and their henchman Vitellozzo Vitelli, tyrant lord of Città di Castello. The three had been in Provence in the service of Charles VIII when word reached them of the pope’s offensive, and the king had given them money with which to ride to the rescue. Giuliano della Rovere had come with them, desperate to make certain that the pope’s campaign failed.

  Guidobaldo da Montefeltro was away from Bracciano at this time, recuperating from an injury. At the approach of the relief force, Juan Borgia broke off the siege—probably a sensible move—and removed his artillery to safety behind the walls of the town of Anguillara. When Guidobaldo rejoined him, they set out in search of the enemy, coming upon them near Soriano on January 24, 1497. D’Alviano and his Orsini kin, as it happened, were spoiling for a fight, knowing as they did that Virginio had died in Naples nine days before. Perhaps they had already heard the rumor—it is not impossible that they started the rumor—that Alexander had ordered him poisoned.

  The battle that ensued, though hard-fought on both sides, cost the pope’s young dukes everything they had gained over the preceding months and brought their campaign to an ignominious end. Guidobaldo was taken prisoner, Juan Borgia ran for Rome after suffering a slight wound, and their army was scattered. The cause of the disaster was a blunder by the usually competent Fabrizio Colonna, who by advancing too aggressively had left his flank exposed to the savagely aggressive Vitellozzo Vitelli. The result was humiliation for Guidobaldo, who found himself being held for ransom; for Juan, who became a laughingstock because of his flight; and above all for the pope. For the victors, who found themselves back in control of the countryside north of Rome, it was bittersweet revenge.

  Alexander reacted by doing what he would have been wise to do in the first place: he sent an appeal to Naples for Gonsalvo to come north and take command. Other developments, however, soon made a resumption of the offensive impossible. On January 17 the latest conflict between France and Spain was suspended by a truce, and in order not to jeopardize it, Ferdinand began pressing Rome to stop making war on King Charles’s Orsini minions. Venice meanwhile wanted to avoid French involvement in a dispute it was having with Naples over certain Adriatic ports—a dispute in which Alexander was siding with Ferrandino, urging him to stand firm—and so it too applied what pressure it could to get the pope to desist. Even the Orsini were eager for an end to hostilities, being satisfied with the fruits of their victory at Soriano and having had a taste of what the Spanish were capable of when under Gonsalvo’s command. Alexander yielded, if regretfully. He accepted from the Orsini an indemnity of fifty thousand gold ducats along with their promise to refrain from offensive action. In return he released the Orsini still held prisoner in Naples—the deceased Virginio’s vengeful son Gian Giordano among them. He handed over the properties the Orsini had earlier lost to Guidobaldo and Juan. On balance, the Orsini had survived Alexander’s offensive with their strength undiminished and their freedom of action unimpaired.

  Gonsalvo arrived in Rome four days after the signing of the settlement. Rather than allowing his long journey to go for naught and his talents to go unused, Alexander dispatched him and Juan as co-commanders to the port of Ostia, which was now one of France’s few outposts south of Genoa and the last bit of Italy still professing loyalty to Giuliano della Rovere. Its capture came within a couple of weeks and was important. It restored the River Tiber to Rome’s control, so that for the first time in two years food and other necessities could be imported by ship and barge. Alexander took personal possession of Ostia amid great celebration, using the occasion to declare all of Cardinal della Rovere’s benefices forfeit and to remove his brother as prefect of Rome. The cardinal himself was now in permanent exile, serving as archbishop of Avignon under the protection of the French crown, biding his time and dreaming of revenge.

  The only difficulties of the Ostia campaign involved Juan Borgia and rose out of the abrasiveness of his personality. He clashed almost violently with Gonsalvo, who was more than twice his age and an immeasurably more capable and respected soldier. Gonsalvo developed such hearty contempt for his young co-commander that later, during Easter observances in Rome, he refused to accept a palm from the pope’s hands because this modest honor had been conferred on Juan first. Lucrezia Borgia’s husband, Giovanni Sforza, also was at Ostia, having finally and with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm consented to leave his palace at Pesaro and contribute his troops to the pope’s wars. He too was seen to have a heated dispute with the duke of Gandía, the cause of which is not known. The duke had a talent for giving offense and did more than all his siblings to make the people of Rome hate the Spaniards among them. If Alexander had any awareness of this, there is no evidence that he cared.

  The recovery of Ostia coincided with the signing of a truce between the Holy League—which at this point meant, in practical terms, Venice and Rome only—and France. Military operations thus came to an end at last, and Italy entered upon a half-year of general tranquillity. Once again Alexander was free to turn his attention where he wished, and he began to make his family his first priority to such an extent that in time he would appear to be almost in the grip of an obsession. He did so first—it seems fitting almost to the point of inevitability—in connection with the crown of Naples.

  It happened that Ferrandino, only twenty-seven years old, had unexpectedly died some months before. This energetic and courageous young monarch, recently wed to an aunt with whom he was passionately in love (she was a daughter of his grandfather Ferrante but several years younger than her nephew-husband nonetheless), probably fell victim to malaria. His passing is easily seen as a tragedy for the House of Aragon, as by all accounts he was free of the most appalling traits of his father and grandfather. In fact, however, the uncle who succeeded him, Alfonso II’s younger brother Federico or Don Fadrique, was at least as impressive and less alarmingly impulsive. The third new king of Naples in just three years, Fadrique was in firm control of his throne, thanks largely to the presence of Gonsalvo’s Spanish troops. But he needed to be crowned, this could only be done by his liege lord the pope or someone deputized by the pope, and his coronation was now
conspicuously overdue. No one was surprised, therefore, when Alexander announced in consistory that the time had come for one of the cardinals to go to Naples and conduct the necessary formalities.

  Eyebrows went up, however, when the pope announced his choice: Cardinal Cesare. Twenty-two years old at most, three years a cardinal, Cesare was known for nothing except the dashing figure he cut in his pursuit of pleasure and such boyish exploits as his escape from Charles VIII. The conferring of such a prestigious assignment on a youth who made no pretense at taking his clerical status seriously was almost a provocation. It was resented by his older colleagues, the ambitious as well as the distinguished, those sensitive to the proprieties as well as those thinking mostly of the rich gifts a ruler of Naples could be expected to bestow upon whoever anointed him as king.

  A bigger shock followed just days later, when the cardinals were again called together and informed of the pope’s newest plans for Juan duke of Gandía. Still only six months from his flight from the battlefield at Soriano, Juan was to be invested with the duchy of Benevento, an ancient papal fief only some fifty miles north of Naples and, with its great palace and fortifications, an anchor of papal strength in the south. He was also made lord of the cities of Terracina and Pontecorvo, and all these places were to be inheritable in perpetuity by his legitimate male descendants. The kingdom of Naples had historical claims to these places and disputed the pope’s right to bestow them on anyone, but Alexander’s timing was impeccable: Don Fadrique’s need for papal investiture was certain to deter him from objecting strongly. Only one cardinal, Pope Pius II’s nephew Francesco Piccolomini, spoke openly in opposition to Alexander’s alienation of so much papal territory for the benefit not only of an undistinguished lay member of the Borgia family but of Borgias yet unborn. Gandía being a nephew-by-marriage of Spain’s ruling monarchs, the Sacred College’s Spanish contingent (to which Alexander had added seven members in the five years since his election) were untroubled to see him treated so generously. Though the Italian cardinals were inured to nepotism, the acquiescence of almost all of them makes it impossible not to wonder if Alexander had used bullying tactics to assure their silence.