The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  It is improbable that the king disgorged this much bounty simply to get an annulment. His lawyers would have advised him that the strength of his case made such generosity unnecessary. Quite apart from the question of consummation, the extreme youth of both parties and the fact that they had been ordered to marry by the king made it impossible that their union had involved free and responsible commitment on either side. Louis’s largesse is likely to have had more to do with his ambitions in Italy and his memory of the difficulties that Alexander’s refusal to cooperate had created for Charles VIII. As little as the king was demanding at this stage, Alexander must have been aware that he was likely to demand a good deal more later, when he returned with an army to Italy. The agreement was, not explicitly but by clear implication, a reversal of papal policy, an abandonment of the consistency with which Alexander had refused to acquiesce in Charles VIII’s invasion and opposed possible future incursions. Spain’s rulers, understandably enough, interpreted the whole arrangement as a betrayal. Though Alexander had not repudiated his decades-old friendship with the Spanish crown, he definitely had put it at risk.

  One nagging detail remained to be addressed: Cesare was pursuing a wife and becoming a vassal of the king of France while still a member of the College of Cardinals. He needed to get out from under his red hat. On August 14, 1498, he donned the full regalia of a prince of the Church for the last time—that in itself was a dramatic gesture, Cesare being rarely seen in clerical attire—and appeared before the pope and his fellow prelates. He asked to be allowed to resign from the college and revert to the lay world. Unique though this request was in the centuries-long history of the Sacred College, there was no obstacle in canon law to its being granted, Cesare in his five years as a cardinal never having taken the perpetual vows that priestly ordination entailed. The reasons he gave for requesting release were disarmingly persuasive. He simply told his colleagues what was obviously true: that he had never wanted an ecclesiastical career, had not been consulted before being placed on the path to one while still a child, and knew himself to be so utterly unsuited to life as a churchman that he could only remain in it at the risk of his immortal soul. The only objections came from those few members of the Sacred College who regarded themselves as being under more obligation to Ferdinand and Isabella than to Alexander, and for whom it would have been imprudent to cooperate in the transformation of a Spanish cardinal into a French duke. The college voted to leave the decision with the pope, and so the deed was done. Cesare was permitted to remove himself from a life of total and permanent security, giving up benefices generating an income of some 35,000 ducats annually, and hurl himself into an unforeseeable future.

  Consequences followed quickly. Alexander, knowing how angry Ferdinand and Isabella would be when they learned of this, attempted to placate them by granting very nearly the only thing they wanted that he, as pope, had it in his power to grant. He ceded to them increased authority over the Church in Spain and their many other possessions including those in the New World. Most momentously, and with famously tragic consequences, he freed them to use the Spanish Inquisition as they wished and so to intensify their persecution of Muslims, Jews, and whichever Christians they chose to find suspect. Alexander’s rapprochement with France also dealt a near-fatal blow to whatever remained of friendship between Rome and Milan, opening up a wide gulf between himself on one side and Ludovico and Ascanio Sforza on the other. The Colonna and Orsini were so alarmed by these developments that they brought an end to a vicious little war in which they had been fighting each other for territory, formed an alliance, and threw in with Milan. Even Naples soon joined them, Lucrezia’s marriage to the duke of Bisceglie being not nearly sufficient to overcome Don Fadrique’s fear of the impending French invasion. The willingness of four such improbable parties to form an alliance showed just how frightened all of them were by the rapprochement of Rome and Louis XII. Alexander tried to reassure them, insisting that his understanding with France was strictly a personal matter, limited to finding a place in the world for Cesare and changing nothing politically. He cannot have expected to be believed, but his words created just enough uncertainty to buy a little time. Maintaining lines of communication with Milan and Naples, and making certain that the existence of those lines became the worst-kept secret in Europe, enabled him to keep Louis from becoming too complacent as well.

  The atmosphere in Rome grew thick with tension. On All Saints’ Day, when Alexander said mass in public at St. Peter’s Basilica, he did so behind a shield of armed Spanish guards. Days later, in consistory, Ascanio Sforza accused him of risking the destruction of all Italy by connecting himself to France. “Are you aware, monsignor,” a scornful Alexander replied to his onetime friend, “that it was your brother who invited the French into Italy?” An even sharper exchange took place three days before Christmas, when envoys freshly arrived from Ferdinand and Isabella warned the pope that if he continued on his present course, he was going to find himself answering to a general council of the Church. Both sides spoke with brutal frankness, and both must have been startled by the things being said. The Spaniards accused Alexander of simony and of nepotism beyond the bounds of reason. Alexander went further, declaring that Ferdinand and Isabella were usurpers with no right to their thrones. Told that God had punished him with the death of the duke of Gandía, the pope retorted that God had punished Ferdinand and Isabella far more severely in taking their only son.

  Such intemperate words were so untypical of the usually unflappable Alexander that one shocked observer attributed them to a secret fear that the deal with France had been a colossal mistake. Things escalated from there, with Portugal soon joining Spain in threatening to summon a council and, by implication, elect a new pope. Louis XII sent assurances that there was nothing to fear—that the agreement binding Spain to France made it impossible for Ferdinand to act on his threats. All the same, the hostility of the Spanish royals must have made Alexander wonder if he had made a perilously wrong turn. That his actions in coming to terms with France had been so widely at variance with his own political instincts is a good measure of just how much influence Cesare now had over him.

  Cesare by this time was in France and making himself at home at King Louis’s court. He had departed Rome on October 1, at the end of a period of immensely costly preparations. It was said that all the gold, silver, silk, and jewels to be found in the shops of Rome had been bought up for his use. Then, when everything was in readiness, he had refused to go until his face cleared of an eruption of the symptoms of syphilis. When he finally set out, his retinue was so large, its baggage so mountainous, that hundreds of mules were needed for transporting it to the coast. Whole days were required to get everyone and everything aboard a fleet of galleys at Civitavecchia, and the expedition did not reach Marseilles until October 19. Hundreds of thousands of ducats had been raised to pay for all this, and the means by which they were raised were sometimes appalling. No one thought it a coincidence that just at this time the master of the papal household, an aged Spanish bishop, abruptly found himself arrested on charges of heresy and obliged to surrender his riches to secure his release. All this so that a recently (if voluntarily) defrocked clergyman who had just passed his twenty-fourth birthday could show the French that he was a personage of the highest importance and worthy of a royal bride.

  Louis saw to it that Cesare was received with all possible honors. His arrival at Marseilles was made a grand event, almost a public holiday, and similar formalities were repeated at every stop along his way. At Touraine he met Louis for the first time, and at the onetime papal capital of Avignon he was given an improbably warm welcome by the city’s archbishop—none other than Pope Alexander’s old foe Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. Still in self-imposed exile, della Rovere had resigned himself to the fact that he could hope to gain nothing by remaining hostile to the Borgias if Louis XII was now their friend. From Avignon Cesare moved in stately procession to his ducal seat at Valence, then to Lyons, rej
oining Louis at the ancient hilltop palace of Chinon a week before Christmas.

  For his entry into Chinon Cesare pulled out all the stops. He had himself dressed in cloth of silver and gold, his horse draped with jewels and pearls and fitted with silver shoes. When he came through the city gates, however, the onlooking crowds found him not so much impressive as ridiculous. They snickered up their sleeves, muttering that ostentation on such a scale might have befitted a Roman emperor but on a Spanish provincial was sheer excess. It is characteristic of Cesare that he noted these japes and took a lesson from them. For the rest of his life he would dress in simple black, his only adornment the emblem of King Louis’s Order of St. Michel that hung from a chain around his neck. In matters of attire as in all things, he was a quick learner and rarely made the same mistake twice.

  Once inside Chinon castle and quit of his bejeweled horse, Cesare presented Louis with a papal bull freshly arrived from Rome. It was the longed-for dispensa, declaring the work of the annulment commission complete, the king’s request granted. The nullification was based not on nonconsummation, which could not be proved, but on an eminently legitimate finding that at the time of their wedding both bride and groom had been under royal coercion and too young to bind themselves for life. Having delivered that good news, Cesare further delighted his hosts by unveiling a second bull, this one appointing Archbishop d’Amboise to the College of Cardinals. Both Cesare and Carlotta of Naples were in attendance when, on January 6, 1499, Anne of Brittany was married to Louis XII. Cesare was continuing to press for a betrothal of his own and was continuing to get nonanswers. The king, who by now had secured everything he had hoped for in inviting Cesare to France, nevertheless continued to support his young visitor’s cause. Don Fadrique’s answer was always the same, an echo of what Louis had said earlier: Carlotta would not be forced into a marriage she did not want. Cesare must have been aware, by this point, that Carlotta was in love with a young count, a member of one of Brittany’s most eminent families, and was unwilling to consider any other suitor.

  Cesare found himself in a kind of limbo, almost a hostage. To go home unmarried, after all that he and the pope had done to obtain a royal bride, would have been a humiliation. And so he remained at Chinon, waiting for … it was no longer quite clear what he was waiting for. Weeks passed, and then months, and still he was frozen in place. Young ladies from the fringes of the royal family were put on display for his consideration, but nothing came of that. One consolation was that Louis, in contrast to Don Fadrique of Naples, had taken a liking to Cesare, giving every appearance of enjoying his company and genuinely wanting to help him. There is nothing surprising in this. Physically so attractive that people spoke of him as the handsomest man in Italy, Cesare also had the same bright good nature as the pope and his sister Lucrezia. He had been given the nickname Valentino when, barely grown, he was made the archbishop of Valencia. It remained appropriate, and in use, now that he was duke of Valentinois. The dashing Valentino would have been a welcome addition to any Renaissance court. Young as he was, though, the pleasures of a courtier’s life did not satisfy. He wanted to get on with things. His fate depended entirely on the support of a pope who, though still vital and vibrant, was now approaching seventy. That made Cesare a young man in a hurry.

  But winter passed and spring came, and still nothing changed. It must have been maddening, now that he was a duke and supposedly a soldier and no longer constrained by the claims of the Church, to have to remain idle in Chinon as couriers brought news of momentous developments in the outside world. Being at the French court, he would have been among the first to learn, in February 1499, of Louis’s entry into an agreement with Venice for the partition of the duchy of Milan. He would have understood immediately what this meant: that with any possibility of Venetian assistance removed, the Sforzas of Milan were doomed. A Milan without major allies was indefensible against France, and the fall of the Sforzas would mean that the road to Naples was open once again. Ferdinand of Spain, when he learned of the agreement, was so furious that he recalled his ambassadors not only from Venice but from Rome. These were portentous developments for Europe, for Italy, for Rome, and of course for Cesare himself.

  That the possibility of stopping Louis simply did not exist sheds an intriguing if uncertain light on Cesare’s mission to France. It raises the question of whether perhaps there was more to that mission than a quest for a bride, a title, and wealth. It was a quest for those things, without question, but it also created a relationship, a friendship, that had the potential to save both the Borgia papacy and the sovereignty of Rome. Friendship with an invincible invader could mean safety, survival. Surviving could mean continuing to have options—a chance, at least, of controlling one’s own destiny. It is difficult to believe that none of this had occurred to Alexander by the time he decided to go to such lengths, financial and otherwise, to help make Cesare’s journey a success. In other words, it is not at all certain that Alexander had become incapable of pursuing or even formulating his own policies rather than simply doing whatever Cesare wished. If he was not actively and autonomously attempting to thread his way between the Scylla that was Spain and the Charybdis of France, he was certainly allowing nothing to happen that might close off any of his options.

  The most terrible danger remained clear: that by befriending Louis the pope would make enemies of Ferdinand and Isabella. If this came to pass, his options, his freedom to make choices, would be reduced or possibly even destroyed. He urgently needed to repair his old relationship with Spain, therefore, if only to preserve the possibility that eventually he could play off the two great powers against each other and prevent either from taking control of all Italy. How this might be accomplished, however, was by no means obvious. Ferdinand blamed Alexander when it became apparent that French boots would soon be tramping across Italian soil once again and that he had no way of doing anything about it. Isabella for her part was growing sick of the Borgias: the bad behavior of the late Juan, Cesare’s wild reputation capped by his departure from the Church, Alexander’s move toward France. By springtime it was the declared position of the Spanish government that the election of Alexander VI had been invalid and that a council must be called to put things right. Spain was supported in this not only by Portugal as before but also, now, by that other opponent of French expansion, the Hapsburg emperor Maximilian. The pope’s situation was becoming seriously dangerous.

  Alexander set out to do what he could to reduce the number of things that the Spanish monarchs had to be angry about without undercutting Cesare’s position at Chinon. In response to complaints about how the Church was being stripped bare for the enrichment of the Borgias, he took the Italian duchy of Benevento from the little duke of Gandía and restored direct papal rule. Two months later, to address concerns about the influence of the young Borgias at the papal court, he ordered Lucrezia and Jofrè to once again leave Rome, taking up residence this time in Spoleto and thus reducing their visibility. Interestingly—we get here an indication of the pope’s opinion of the two youngest Borgias—Lucrezia rather than Jofrè was given responsibilities that made her, in effect, governor of Spoleto, in charge of its civil administration. These duties she carried out conscientiously under the watchful eyes of experienced counselors provided for the purpose. She did so in spite of being far along with a second pregnancy (earlier she had suffered a miscarriage, apparently as the result of a fall) and in spite of the embarrassment of having a second husband run away in fear. The duke of Bisceglie, as a new French invasion became a certainty, had understood the implications of Alexander’s new relationship with Louis and concluded like Giovanni Sforza before him that he was not safe in Rome. He fled first to refuge in the castles of the Colonna, then home to Naples. He wrote asking Lucrezia to join him, but his letters were intercepted by the pope. Alexander sent an envoy to Don Fadrique with instructions to return Bisceglie to Rome. The king, wanting no trouble, agreed to make this happen—but not quite yet. When Bisceglie final
ly did rejoin his wife, he did so not at Rome but at her own domain of Spoleto, which promised to be far less dangerous.

  And then from France came great news: a letter from Louis informing Alexander that Cesare was married. Not to Carlotta of Naples, but to the beautiful nineteen-year-old Charlotte d’Albret, daughter of an old French family of the highest distinction and sister of the king of Navarre. Louis reported gleefully that the validity of the union was safe from challenge because Cesare had “broken his lance” no fewer than eight times on his wedding night, adding admiringly that this was double the total he himself had achieved on his first night with Anne of Brittany. Thus it mattered not at all that the bride had been less than eager and had agreed to the union only after being urged by the French king, Anne of Brittany, and her own family. The wedding was performed in the queen’s apartment at the palace of Blois. It had been arranged in the nick of time; not long thereafter Louis’s great army was on the road, marching to Italy. Its lead units were commanded by Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, an experienced and respected condottiere who had been born into the Milanese nobility and begun his military career in the service of the Sforzas but defected to France when Ludovico il Moro promoted a rival over him. Trivulzio was a man with something to prove, and in his quest for vindication he pressed forward aggressively. The king and the rest of the army followed at a leisurely pace, accompanied by, among many other dignitaries, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere and Duke Valentino. Cesare had used some of the wealth he had taken with him to France to hire mercenary troops for Louis XII’s use, and Alexander had contributed still others. Behind this generosity lay an understanding: once Milan was secure, Louis would release a portion of his army—a much larger force than the thousand troops put at Cesare’s disposal when he was made duke of Valentinois—for the use of the Borgias.