The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  As for Juan, there is no sure way of deciding how much credence to give to the many contemptuous descriptions that have come down to us in the chronicles of the time. The number and unanimity of these descriptions make it necessary to accept them as accurate reflections, to some considerable extent, of his character and conduct. Without question he was a pleasure-loving young libertine, capable of displaying the Borgia charm but also of making himself insufferable. The clashes with Gonsalvo and with Giovanni Sforza that we noted earlier were far from unique; a dispute with Cardinal Ascanio Sforza flew so completely out of control that before it ended, their retainers were killing one another in the streets. If it is unnecessary to dismiss the duke as irredeemably vicious, in the face of the available evidence it is pointless even to wonder if he might be an innocent victim of partisan slander. Possibly he had been spoiled as a child; fatherless, he inherited his brother’s dukedom unexpectedly and at an early age and from that point forward was immensely rich, immensely privileged, and perhaps excessively indulged. His story may be, at least in part, the familiar one of too much too soon.

  The many powerful enemies that Juan had made in the year since his return from Spain, and his ability to remain the pope’s favorite in spite of his too-obvious faults, provide the background for one of the most intriguing murder mysteries in all of history. On the evening of June 14, 1497, at a vineyard in Rome, Vannozza Borgia held a going-away party for her son Cesare, who was to depart for his great assignment in Naples within a few days. Juan was among those in attendance, and he was accompanied by a figure in whose company he had been seen repeatedly in recent weeks, a man whose face was concealed behind a mask and whose identity appears to have been unknown to the other party-goers. (Going about masked was somehow not as bizarre a practice in the Italy of the Renaissance as it seems today; it would become almost standard practice for Cesare, especially after his good looks were marred by syphilis.) Late in the evening, as everyone was going home, Juan rode off into the dark streets with his masked companion, the two of them mounted on the same mule with a manservant walking beside. When the three came to a square, Juan told the servant to wait there one hour, and then to go home if his master had not returned. The duke and the masked man then went on their way, the latter to remain a mystery forever, the former never to be seen alive again.

  The next morning, when it was discovered that Juan had not returned to the papal palace, no one was concerned. He was notorious for his nocturnal, mainly amorous adventures, and as the day advanced and he failed to appear, it was assumed that, as had happened before, he was holed up in the room of some paramour, unwilling for the sake of her reputation or perhaps his own to emerge before dark. When night fell and he had still not returned, Alexander became worried. Search parties were sent out. They found the duke’s mule, its trappings disarranged. They also found the manservant, gravely wounded but unable to provide any helpful information. At last someone turned up a clue: the statement of a Slovenian watchman to the effect that, in the middle of the night, he had seen five men dump a body into the Tiber and weigh it down with rocks when it floated to the surface. Asked why he had not reported this, he replied that in the course of many nights standing guard over cargo barges he had seen any number of corpses deposited in the river, and that until now no one had ever seemed to care.

  Fishermen were deployed to drag the river bottom. One of them hooked the dead body of the duke and pulled it out of the mud. It bore nine deep stab wounds, it was still dressed in the costly garments that Juan had worn to his mother’s party, and one of its pockets contained a purse fat with gold. The impossibility of believing that Juan had been killed by robbers added urgency to the question of who had done the deed, and why. As in all the best mysteries, there was an excess of plausible suspects. Ascanio Sforza for one: his recent dispute with Juan had already had fatal consequences. Lucrezia’s husband for another: like his cousin Ascanio, Giovanni Sforza had clashed recently and almost violently with Juan, and Ludovico il Moro’s reconciliation with Charles of France had made Giovanni’s position in Rome so excruciatingly awkward that he believed his life to be in danger. On Good Friday he had fled Rome, first returning to his home base at Pesaro and later proceeding to Milan, where he asked but did not receive help from his cousins Ludovico il Moro and Cardinal Ascanio. The brothers were unwilling to offend Alexander and pressed Giovanni to obey the pope’s order to return to Rome. By then, however, there was no point in returning. Lucrezia had gone into seclusion at the San Sisto convent outside Rome, and Alexander had declared his intention to have her marriage annulled. Though neither Ascanio nor Giovanni was in Rome at the time of Juan’s disappearance, both certainly had the means to arrange his murder.

  Also to be considered was young Guidobaldo duke of Urbino, a gentle, scholarly soul but burning with resentment at being blamed for the defeat at Soriano and left to pay his own ransom in order to win his release. Plus the men of all the families, some of them noble, whose wives and daughters Juan had seduced or targeted for seduction. That line of inquiry brought even the youngest of the Borgia brothers, Jofrè prince of Squillace, into the circle of suspects. He was living in Rome once again, and his wife Sancia was among Juan’s numberless paramours (and Cesare’s). Finally, most worthy of suspicion of all, were the Orsini. It was Juan who had been sent to destroy them, Juan who was to have been given their lands when his mission was accomplished, and Juan who could be expected to take up arms against them once again whenever Alexander felt ready to make another try. Rome was thick with Orsini who were capable of committing murder.

  Alexander was shattered by the discovery of the body. He withdrew into deep seclusion for days, grieving loudly, not eating or drinking or sleeping. When he finally emerged, it was to take control of the search for the killers, though he declared as he did so that he already knew who the culprits were. That he loved the young duke had always been obvious—it is deplorable that we know essentially nothing about the bond that had formed between them, or what exactly about Juan caused the pope to find him so appealing—and the weight of his loss was obvious now. Perhaps too he was tormented by guilt, by the realization that he had given the boy more authority and responsibility than he was capable of handling, thereby exposing him to the wrath of their foes.

  Alexander assembled the cardinals and poured out his grief. “The duke of Gandía is dead,” he said. “A greater calamity could not have befallen us, for we bore him unbounded affection. Life has lost its interest for us. Indeed, had we seven papacies we would give them all to recall the duke to life. It must be that God thus punishes us for our sins, for the duke has done nothing to deserve so terrible a fate.” He then went through an abridged list of the obvious suspects—the Sforzas, Jofrè, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro—and said he knew all of them to be innocent.

  Of the Orsini he said nothing. No stretch of the imagination is required to suppose that Alexander had satisfied himself of their guilt and had decided to keep silent. He would have been powerless, in that summer of 1497, to bring the Orsini to justice or to exact other forms of revenge. By keeping his own counsel, he could watch and wait.

  Alexander ended his investigation sooner than anyone had expected and forbade further inquiries into Juan’s death. In the fullness of time it would be suggested, and repeated in almost everything written about the Borgias, that he did this upon learning that the murderer was in fact Cesare. This is a logical inference—but only if one begins by assuming Cesare’s guilt. For at least a century now virtually every responsible student of the Borgias has found it impossible to assume anything of the kind. Scholars have concluded instead that Cesare was almost certainly not guilty (certainty being impossible in a matter of this kind). They finally noticed, if belatedly, that in the aftermath of his brother’s death Cesare was never so much as mentioned among the possible suspects, even by the gossips, and that when he began to be mentioned and then declared guilty, this was invariably done by propagandists and sensation-seekers. Cesare had act
ually stood to gain little or nothing from the murder. Juan was survived by a wife, an infant daughter, and a small son who as third duke of Gandía inherited all of his father’s possessions in Italy as well as Spain. Cesare remained exactly what he had been when Juan was alive: a wealthy and restless young cardinal, ridiculously out of place in the vocation in which he found himself.

  At that first consistory after the murder, after giving vent to his feelings and doing what he could to clear the Sforzas and others of suspicion, Alexander turned to other matters. He said that during the days and nights when his pain was so intense as to make it impossible to sleep, he had come to a decision. “We are resolved without delay to think of the Church first and foremost,” he declared, “and not of ourselves nor of our privileges.” He announced that he was creating a commission of six cardinals—men who, when their names were disclosed, proved to be among the most respected members of the Sacred College—and assigning it to set to work immediately on developing a program of ecclesiastical reform. He concluded by saying that “we must begin by reforming ourselves,” pledging that he would “submit our own person to the regulations that they [the commissioners] shall make.” Obviously it is possible that these words are an admission that Alexander had not been faithful to his priestly vows, that even since his election he had been guilty of serious immorality. It should not be necessary to note also, however, that they are not necessarily anything of the kind. Such things could be said, and at various times have been said, by good men and women of many faiths, including pontiffs known for their humility and virtuous lives.

  Three days after the consistory Cesare departed for Naples and the crowning of Don Fadrique. It has often been suggested that he should not have gone so soon after his brother’s death, with Alexander in such a depressed state. That he should have asked to be replaced and insisted on going because he was eager to put himself beyond the reach of the men investigating the murder. Eager he may or may not have been, but if he was hoping for anything, it was not necessarily to escape scrutiny. He was young and high-spirited, and it is not implausible that what he wanted to get away from was the deep gloom that had descended upon the papal household and court. Naples offered not only a coronation ceremony in which Cesare was slated to play a central role but all the festivities attendant upon such an event. In any case he departed on schedule, and when his assignment was completed, he decided to remain in Naples, a city with much to interest a vigorous young man with a relaxed moral code.

  With his departure, none of the young Borgias remained at the papal court. Juan was in his tomb, and in the aftermath of his murder, in the depths of his grief, Alexander had ordered Jofrè to return to his principality of Squillace in Naples and take Sancia with him. He did so possibly for their safety but more likely because he was disgusted with incessant gossip about Sancia’s sexual escapades. Jofrè, all of fifteen years old now and in his third year as a married man, is not likely to have regarded his exile as a punishment or a loss. He and Sancia had spent the first two years of their marriage in Squillace and had grown accustomed there to a life of indolent self-indulgence. Alexander must have realized by now that this was one young Borgia of whom not a great deal was to be expected. The boy’s tolerance of being repeatedly cuckolded, even by his brothers, bespoke softness of character, a willingness, not characteristic of the Borgias, to settle for a passive if privileged existence.

  Lucrezia meanwhile was sequestered at the convent of San Sisto just outside Rome, waiting for an ecclesiastical court to declare that she was not married to Giovanni Sforza and never had been. Their union appears never to have had any substance on the personal level; the available evidence, sparse as it is, suggests that Lucrezia found her new life dreary, her spouse uninteresting. When she refused to end a visit to Rome late in 1496 and return to Pesaro as Sforza naturally expected, he grudgingly joined her, remaining until Easter of the following year. But daily contact with the Borgias served only to worsen matters, showing Sforza that his wife’s family had no liking and little use for him, making him increasingly uneasy. It was during his sojourn in Rome that, taking part in the siege of Ostia, he was observed in an angry exchange with Juan Borgia. He was learning too that Cesare, cardinal or not, could be a dangerous acquaintance. He would have heard the story of how, when Charles VIII’s army passed through Rome after withdrawing from Naples, Cesare had led an attack on a company of Swiss mercenaries, seeking revenge for the earlier sacking of his mother Vannozza’s house. This episode, which ended with sixteen of the Swiss dead and the survivors beaten and stripped of every possession, had become part of a growing body of Roman lore about the Borgia brothers and their reckless ways.

  Making everything more frightening still was the painfully obvious fact that the circumstances that had led to Lucrezia’s being offered to the Sforzas as a bride no longer obtained. The marriage had seemed important when Alexander and Ferrante of Naples were at odds and Sforza Milan seemed an essential counterweight to Neapolitan power. Now, with not only Ferrante but his heir Alfonso II dead and the pope established as Naples’s best friend among the Italian powers, all that was in the past. Shortly after Easter 1497 Sforza left Rome in disguise and returned to Pesaro alone. On an earlier occasion, when he had returned to Pesaro without Lucrezia, he had done so out of simple pique and weariness with a make-believe marriage to a child. This time, however, he was in flight and fearful of his life. Alexander, no doubt pleased to be rid of him, asked the appropriate legal authorities to declare Lucrezia’s marriage invalid. She disappeared into the San Sisto convent, and by the time of Juan Borgia’s murder the pope and Cesare were already considering where to marry her next.

  The murder put all such things in abeyance. In the weeks after Cesare’s departure for Naples, little happened at the Vatican beyond the routine performance of the Curial bureaucracy’s essential functions. The most conspicuous exception was the pope’s newly created reform commission, the members of which began meeting almost daily, filling more and more pages—ultimately more than six hundred—with lists of Church problems and possible remedies. A number of the commission’s recommendations were directed at the Sacred College itself: that even when hosting banquets cardinals should not serve more than two meats, that no cardinal should serve as the representative of a secular prince, that when moving about Rome no cardinal should have an entourage of more than twenty horsemen, that there should never be more than twenty-four cardinals, and that among them should be representatives of all the major nations of Europe. Vatican policy came under scrutiny as well: the commission proposed higher qualifications for protonotaries, new ways of dealing with disagreements over how much autonomy the Church should have in various countries, and harsh punishment for the forging of official documents. This last was a problem of real urgency; the rudimentary technology of the time made forgery all too easy, detection exceedingly difficult. This was made freshly apparent in September, when the archbishop who was Pope Alexander’s private secretary confessed to having produced and sold large numbers of counterfeit dispensations.

  Action, however, was going to require the attention of the pope, and Alexander was only beginning to emerge from seclusion. He was not yet himself, which is perhaps why, after long resistance, he yielded wearily to the demand of the College of Cardinals that Savonarola’s excommunication be announced to Florence and the world.

  When summer ended Cesare, advised that the pope was no longer in the depths of despair and that life at the papal court was beginning to be tolerable once again, decided to end his holiday in Naples. He was now fully formed, the formidable figure soon to be described by the Venetian diplomat Paolo Capello as “physically most beautiful … tall and well-made.” He took two things back to Rome with him: “the French disease,” syphilis, and a determination to start his life over on an entirely new track.

  Background

  THE YOUNG ONES

  IF THE MOST WIDELY ACCEPTED ESTIMATE OF CESARE BORGIA’S date of birth is correct, he was just r
eaching his twenty-second birthday when he returned from Naples. He was already, however, a man of obvious and exceptional gifts. Strong, athletic, and restlessly energetic, strikingly good-looking under a mane of dark-reddish hair, he combined the intelligence that had won him distinction as a student of civil and canon law with a winning personality, a steely will, and a degree of self-possession that was quite extraordinary in such a young man.

  He was also, as the revenge killing of sixteen Swiss soldiers shows, already capable of utterly ruthless behavior.

  The fact that Cesare was a second son explains why his family had set him on the path to a clerical career when he was still a small child. He had a much older brother, Pedro Luis, to pursue success in the lay world and produce heirs. His own assignment was to climb the same ecclesiastical ladder that, two decades before his birth, had taken Alonso Borgia to the papacy and Rodrigo to the vice-chancellorship and brought bounty to the whole family. Inevitably, and for reasons having nothing to do with merit, he was pulled up that ladder at a fabulously (by today’s standards, a ridiculously) rapid pace. When all of seven years old, he was made an apostolic protonotary (a coveted position supposedly requiring advanced knowledge of the law), and shortly thereafter he became canon of the cathedral of Valencia, archdeacon of Játiva, and rector of Gandía. Each of these positions brought with it an income that few Spanish clerics could ever hope to achieve. Together they supported Cesare in the style of a young noble and provided him with an elite education without making even small demands on the family’s resources.