The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  Milan fell with remarkable ease. At the start of September, with Trivulzio bearing down on him, Ludovico Sforza abandoned his capital and joined his brother-in-law Emperor Maximilian in the Tyrolean Alps, taking with him his two small sons, his brother Cardinal Ascanio, and a fortune in gold and jewels. He might not have given up quite so easily if his wife Beatrice d’Este had been on hand to stiffen his spine, but her death two years earlier, still only twenty-one years old, had deprived him of his most trusted source of counsel. When Trivulzio took possession of the city of Milan on September 11, Louis and his retinue were still far behind, crossing the mountains from Grenoble to Turin. The king would not make his own grand entry into Milan until early October, but before that happened his mastery of the whole of the duchy would be complete. All this was capped by expressions of friendship from Ferdinand of Spain, which freed Louis to focus on the consolidation of his gains and ponder his options where his claim to the crown of Naples was concerned.

  The conquest of Milan seemed a vindication of Alexander’s alliance with France. Louis XII’s effortless success, coupled with the commitments he had made to the pope, ensured that the Borgias would now have the resources to pursue their own objectives in the Papal States. As a kind of bonus, Ferdinand’s determination to remain at least temporarily on amicable terms with France left him with no option except to put aside his grievances against the pope, Alexander as well as Rome now being in effect under French protection. For the first time in a long time Alexander found himself free not just to react to the actions of others but to take the initiative, and to do so in his own interests.

  He did so with as much boldness as he had ever shown in his life, declaring that all the lords of the Romagna had forfeited their right to the cities their families had ruled for generations, in some cases for centuries. The scope of the bull with which he did this was breathtaking. It excommunicated several of the most important families in northern Italy: the Riarii of Imola and Forlì, the Malatesta of Rimini, the Manfredi of Faenza, the Varani of Camerino, and Giovanni Sforza in Pesaro. It even extended to the Montefeltri of Urbino, whose domain was outside the Romagna. All were declared dispossessed. They were to be replaced by one man, a new papal vicar for all the affected states: Cesare Borgia, duke of Valentinois.

  The pope’s act, if shocking, was entirely lawful, the lords in question being not only without legitimacy in many cases but years behind in paying tribute to Rome. Nor was it unjustified, when one considers the hard methods employed by most of those same lords to maintain control of the places they ruled, and the problems that their lawlessness created for Italy at large.

  No words inscribed on a sheet of vellum, however, were going to get them to surrender control. That was going to require force. Force that would be applied by Valentino.

  16

  The Landscape Changes

  Fourteen ninety-nine changed everything.

  It transformed Louis XII’s place in the world. His effortless conquest of the great duchy of Milan elevated him, seemingly overnight, from a kind of political abstraction, a fearsome but remote potential threat, into the master of northern Italy. Suddenly he was the power that no one north of Naples could dare defy.

  His liking for the bold young man he had made duke of Valentinois, and his appreciation of how much trouble Pope Alexander had spared him by not opposing his incursion into Italy, transformed Louis in another way as well. He became—within limits defined by his perception of his own strategic interests—a willing patron of the Borgias. This in turn transformed the pope’s position, giving him more freedom of action than he had previously known. That freedom, as things turned out, would be used mainly for Cesare’s benefit, as he pursued his dreams of greatness.

  For Alexander and Cesare alike, the next step was obvious. The time had come for a new offensive against the warlords of the Papal States, with Cesare in command this time. For Alexander, removing or at least taming the warlords was the only way of achieving control of the Church’s domains, a goal that had eluded his predecessors for centuries. Cesare’s ultimate objective could scarcely have been more ambitious without bringing his sanity into question. It was to carve out of the Papal States, for himself, a principality substantial enough to place him among the great men of Italy—not just to become a petty tyrant ruling over one or two small cities like Caterina Sforza or Vitellozzo Vitelli, but to assemble a state on an equal level with the Urbino of the Montefeltri and the Ferrara of the Este, conceivably with Florence or even Milan and Venice.

  What made this dream feasible was Louis of France’s presence in northern Italy and his courting of the Borgias, his willingness to trade his support for theirs. This gave Rome a strength—albeit a largely borrowed strength—that it had barely possessed since the time, seven hundred years before, when Charlemagne and his father had made themselves masters of Italy and shared their conquests with the popes of the time. As for the fact that, to become a legitimate ruler in the Papal States, Cesare would have to accept subordinate status as a vassal of the pope, there was so little reason to object that it didn’t matter. Even the kings of Naples were papal vassals, and they had rarely been inconvenienced as a result.

  Alexander and Cesare made no move until Louis was comfortably settled in the north of Italy and therefore in a relaxed and magnanimous frame of mind, at which point they secured his approval of their plans and were able to start making things happen. They made them happen quickly. In November, barely a month after Louis’s triumphal entry into Milan, Alexander made a fast grab at some low-hanging fruit, seizing the lands and castles of the Gaetani, a family considerably less powerful than the Orsini or the Colonna. The Gaetani holdings lay along the frontier where the Papal States abutted Naples and had considerable strategic value because the main highway connecting Rome and Naples ran through them. Though Alexander’s grounds for declaring them forfeit were unarguably sound—the Gaetani had allied themselves with Naples when Rome was at odds with Ferrante, thereby failing in a fundamental feudal obligation—such offenses had been routine among the vicars of the Papal States much longer than anyone could remember. Only the support of the French king made it possible for him to proceed. Without that support, without the fact that everyone knew of that support, other and more powerful clans almost certainly would have come to the defense of the Gaetani. Don Fadrique of Naples would likely have intervened as well.

  The most surprising aspect of the attack on the Gaetani was not the fact that Alexander attempted it but his way of disposing of the seized properties. He sold them, and to, of all people, Lucrezia Borgia. She by this time was reunited with her husband, had just weeks before given birth to a son they named Rodrigo, and in the aftermath of her good performance at Spoleto was now in charge of the papal city of Nepi as well. Where she obtained the purchase price of eighty thousand ducats is unknown; possibly it was given to her out of the pontifical treasury, which if true made the transaction not a sale at all but a swindle. The whole affair is in any case another example of the extent to which restoring the power of the papacy and advancing the fortunes of his family had come to be intertwined not only in the pope’s thinking but in his actions. The tangle was probably inherent in the situation. A conquest of the Papal States in the pope’s name would be an assertion of the authority of Rome, no less if done by Cesare than by anyone else. And, it being necessary to entrust the management of the Papal States to some vicar, who better than Cesare?

  Almost simultaneously with Alexander’s move against the Gaetani, Cesare embarked upon his new career as a soldier, bidding farewell to Louis XII and riding out of Milan at the head of a force of eighteen hundred cavalry and four thousand infantry brightly caparisoned in the red and yellow colors of the Borgias. Most of this force was made up of Swiss and Gascon mercenaries on loan from the king, all of them under the direct command of the Frenchman Yves d’Alègre. It was Alexander’s reward for his support of the Milan campaign, and it was Cesare’s to use—more or less—in whatever way he w
ished. Thus he found himself with the means to invade the Romagna and begin expelling the rulers of its numerous, mostly small city-states. Strategically the Romagna was a sensible choice: in the shadow of Milan and therefore within easy reach of the French king’s protection, far enough from Naples not to heighten the alarm that had been felt there when Alexander attacked the Gaetani.

  Alexander had laid the groundwork for Cesare’s offensive, his impresa, back in July, with his bull excommunicating the Romagna’s leading lords. Nothing remained now but to enforce the bull and to do so in a way that was acceptable to the French and did not trigger a countermove by Venice, the only other state both close enough to the Romagna to have a real stake in its future and strong enough to make trouble. These considerations decided Cesare’s selection of his first targets: the little cities of Imola and Forlì on the Via Emilia, the ancient Roman road that runs with scarcely more than an occasional gentle curve from Bologna down to the Adriatic coast. Imola and Forlì were an obvious choice because they were ruled, in the name of her eldest son, by Caterina Sforza, whom the events of 1499 had left utterly isolated. Louis XII had no possible interest in protecting a woman who was not only a Sforza, a niece of Ludovico il Moro, but had helped her uncle to recruit troops in the Romagna as he tried to prepare for the French invasion. When asked to include Caterina in his new alliance with Florence, Louis ingenuously replied that he could not possibly intrude into the pope’s affairs in such a way. It was an empty excuse, but the king’s position was so strong that he had no need to make himself believable.

  Nor would Venice grieve to see Caterina destroyed. A year earlier, when Venetian troops set out to cross the Romagna at the start of a campaign aimed at making Florence a satellite of Venice, Caterina had been alone in offering resistance. She did so with such ferocious determination that the invaders, hampered by their war with the Turks, were obliged to return home. Now, in 1500, she was not only Venice’s enemy in her own right but also the chosen enemy of Venice’s sole important friend, Rome. Because of the Turkish threat, the Venetians could hardly have considered trying to save Caterina even had they been inclined to do so, which they emphatically were not. They had earlier annoyed Alexander by warning him that they would brook no interference with their near neighbor Ercole d’Este, whose duchy of Ferrara could have been a rich prize and potentially an ideal base for Cesare. They could not have been less interested in offending him further by interfering with Cesare’s plans.

  Even a friendless virago was a dangerous enemy, however. Since the last time we encountered her—in 1488, the year she outwitted and annihilated the murderers of her husband Girolamo Riario—Caterina had made herself as hated and feared as any warlord in Italy. She was violent, ruthless, and capable of almost insane cruelty. At age thirty-six she was still blond and beautiful, though not as slim as she had been in her youth, had been widowed three times, and was the mother of five sons and a daughter by Riario, a sixth son by her second husband Giacomo Feo, and a seventh by her third husband, an obscure member of the Medici family. Feo like Riario had been murdered, again deservedly so, and this time in taking revenge Caterina had not only wiped out the killers but had had their wives and children—including small children—tortured and executed. Though she had added considerably to Pope Alexander’s troubles at the time of the first French invasion by allying herself with her cousins in Milan and thus with Charles VIII, this had not prevented the pontiff from later proposing a marriage of her eldest son and heir, Ottaviano Riario, to Lucrezia. Caterina had declined; such a union could have made it difficult for her to continue ruling Imola and Forlì in the ineffectual Ottaviano’s name.

  Caterina’s great problem, as Cesare’s assault force approached, was that there was only one of her and she had two cities to defend. She barricaded herself inside the rocca at Forlì, leaving Imola under the command of a condottiere named Dionigi di Naldi. In Caterina’s absence Imola proved impossible to hold, its inhabitants having suffered far too much at the hands of Caterina and her husbands to be willing to sacrifice anything on her behalf. Di Naldi and his troops withdrew into Imola’s rocca, but when Cesare and d’Alègre arrived and put on a demonstration of what their artillery could do to brickwork battlements, the fight was over. Di Naldi not only opened the fortress’s gates but joined Cesare’s army. It was agreed, as part of the surrender terms, that d’Alègre’s mercenaries would not be allowed inside the town walls of Imola. This proved to be unenforceable, assuming that the French commander made any attempt to enforce it, and the consequences were horrific: pillaging and rapine of the kind that the soldiers of northern Europe regarded as their right but that few Italians then living had ever experienced.

  At Forlì, in the beginning, things unfolded much as they had at Imola. The townsfolk, evidently unaware of what had happened to their neighbors, welcomed the invaders while Caterina watched from the ramparts of her fortress. This time, however, Cesare made certain that the French troops were kept away from the civilians. And this time, Caterina Sforza being in personal command of the defenses, there would be no surrender. Having sent her children off to the safety of Florence, Caterina settled in for a fight to the finish, showing her contempt for the people who had been her subjects for the previous twenty years by bombarding their homes with stone cannonballs. “Should I have to perish,” she is supposed to have said, “I want to perish like a man.” Any doubts about whether it was going to be a long, hard siege were laid to rest when Caterina, to spread the general misery, broke open Forlì’s irrigation dams. The Romagna landscape being little less flat than a billiard table, she thereby succeeded in flooding both the town and the countryside surrounding and caused Cesare’s siege machinery to bog down in mud. At about this same time, Caterina or someone associated with her attempted to assassinate the pope at long distance, with an early experiment in chemical warfare. A message was sent to him wrapped either in poison or (depending on which version of the story is preferred) in fabric worn by a victim of the plague. The experiment failed and no harm was done aside from a further heightening, if such a thing was possible, of the general hostility.

  Caterina hung on doggedly through three brutal weeks as ball after ball smashed into the walls of her rocca, which finally began to develop large cracks. Her spirits must have soared at reports that her uncle Ludovico il Moro was coming down out of the Alps at the head of an army, intent upon retaking Milan. The reports were true; the gold with which he had earlier fled Milan had provided Ludovico with ample funds with which to hire and equip a substantial body of Swiss mercenaries. If he moved quickly enough and was at all successful, Louis XII would be forced to recall his troops from the Romagna. Cesare would have no choice but to break off his siege.

  Things did not work out that way. On January 12 Cesare’s bombardment finally bore fruit, opening a sizable hole in one of the walls of Caterina’s stronghold and allowing d’Alègre’s infantry to pour through. The hand-to-hand combat that followed ended with Caterina, seeing that defeat had become inevitable, attempting to commit suicide by blowing up her gunpowder magazine. A defective fuse foiled that effort, and she was taken prisoner by the French, her fortress falling into Cesare’s hands. He had to pay d’Alègre to hand Caterina herself over, regarding her as far too dangerous to be left in anyone’s custody but his own. Soon after, when he set off with his troops for his next objective, Giovanni Sforza’s city of Pesaro, he took his captive with him. By not only defeating the famed virago but stripping her of her cities, he had catapulted himself into first place among the soldiers of Italy. Stories circulated of how he repeatedly raped Caterina after she was in his custody, and though they enhanced his reputation as an enemy to be feared, they are of dubious provenance. It is just as plausible that Caterina, who in the course of her career had more lovers than husbands, made her person available to Cesare in hopes of gaining an advantage. It is no less possible that the two did not become intimately involved at all.

  Cesare was en route to Pesaro, which had al
ready been abandoned by a frightened Giovanni Sforza, when a courier came galloping in with instructions for Yves d’Alègre to quick-march his troops back to Milan. Il Moro had reentered his old capital to the welcoming shouts of his former subjects, who after a taste of French occupation had decided—much like the Neapolitans in the time of Charles VIII—that the Sforzas were not so intolerable after all. D’Alègre’s men were to become part of the force that Louis XII was assembling in hope of saving his position. The speed of this reversal made Louis’s invasion seem as empty an achievement as his predecessor’s had been. It resurrected old questions about how wise the pope had been in allying Rome with France.

  The Sforza resurgence, however, was short-lived. In March, with a decisive battle apparently impending, Il Moro found himself abandoned to the mercy of his enemies. The Swiss mercenaries who had made possible his return to Italy, called upon to attack the Swiss in the employ of King Louis, declared that doing so was out of the question. They turned on their heels and departed, leaving Ludovico face-to-face with his enemies without an army at his back. He became a prisoner, as did his brother Cardinal Ascanio. Together they were taken away to France, where Ludovico would remain in confinement for the rest of his life. Louis XII took custody of the child who would have been duke of Milan if not for Ludovico’s usurpation: the still only nine-year-old Francesco Sforza, grandson of Il Moro’s late brother the psychopath Galeazzo Maria. No doubt to keep him from producing more claimants to the ducal title, the boy was consigned to the Church and to a comfortable future as abbot of a French monastery of no particular importance.