The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  The withdrawal of d’Alègre’s troops had brought Cesare’s first impresa to an unexpected, and from his perspective a deplorably premature, end. He had to abandon the march on Pesaro. Leaving Imola and Forlì in the firm hands of a longtime associate, a ruthlessly tough veteran of the Spanish reconquista named Ramiro de Lorqua, he set out for Rome. Pope Alexander, who had ordered bonfires lit all around Rome upon learning of the capture of Forlì, now outdid himself, arranging an extravagant public celebration of Cesare’s arrival and modeling it on the “triumphs” with which the emperors of old had marked the return of conquerors. On February 25 the whole city was turned out: cardinals, bishops, ambassadors, and Rome’s noble families stood waiting to cheer as Cesare passed through the Porta del Popolo at the head of his shrunken and weary army. With him, a trophy on display, was Caterina Sforza. After refusing to sign away her son’s rights to Forlì and Imola, she was locked up in the Castel Sant’Angelo, where, so the story goes, her hair quickly turned white.

  The pope conferred on Cesare the Golden Rose, an ancient honor usually reserved for royalty, and the coveted title gonfaloniere or standard-bearer of the Church, previously held by such masters of the military arts as Francesco Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro as well as by Cesare’s distinctly less deserving brother Juan.

  Louis XII being now back in control of Milan and eager to demonstrate his generosity to faithful friends, Cesare was almost immediately able to begin planning a second Romagna campaign. Though still dependent on the king’s assistance, he was growing wary of it, having experienced at first hand how viciously uncontrollable France’s mercenaries could be and how quickly they could be withdrawn when Louis decided that he needed them elsewhere. Cesare began looking to the Vatican for more of the money he needed. With Alexander’s skeptical acquiescence—though the pope definitely wanted control of the Papal States, he was less confident than Cesare that the Romagna was the place to start and less certain that trading friendship with Spain for friendship with France made strategic sense—Cesare began drawing from the pontifical treasury sums that in time would become nearly insupportable.

  For the moment, fortunately for Cesare, the papal coffers were exceptionally full, the reforms introduced by Alexander having by this time begun to produce both increased revenues and substantial savings. The revenues of the alum mines at Tolfa were continuing to accumulate also, and Alexander had created a cash bonanza by declaring 1500 a jubilee year and promising special indulgences that were drawing pilgrims to Rome by the tens of thousands. Though he cannot be accused of neglecting other needs—in response to the Turkish threat Alexander was sending forty thousand ducats a year to the king of Hungary and paying for the construction and equipping of fifteen warships at Venice—good management and good luck were providing him with the means to help Cesare as well.

  For Cesare especially, but for all the young Borgias, the early summer of 1500 was a time for basking in good fortune. Alexander issued a bull appointing Cesare vicar—lord in the pope’s name—of Imola and Forlì. News arrived from France that Cesare’s bride, Charlotte d’Albret, was expecting his child. There is no explanation of why Charlotte failed to join her husband in Italy. Louis XII may have found it advisable to keep her in his custody, if not quite as a hostage then at least as an enhancement of his leverage over the Borgias. As for Cesare himself, it was not in his nature to pine for any woman; the most famously beautiful courtesan in Rome, a Florentine named Fiammetta, had by this time become his principal mistress. On June 24, as part of the Vatican’s celebration of the Feast of St. John the Baptist, he put on a display of his bullfighting skills in the piazza of St. Peter’s Basilica, killing five bulls from horseback and a sixth on foot, severing the head of the last with a single blow of his sword. It should not be forgotten that even at this point, recognized though he already was as the most fearsome Italian alive and a rising political force in his own right, Cesare was not yet twenty-five years old. His most colorful and extravagant actions are generally best understood as expressions of sheer animal exuberance—the overflowing vitality of a gifted, ambitious, energetic, and burningly impatient young man.

  The summer idyll of 1500 came to an abrupt and frightening end on the night of July 15, a date that marks the beginning of another of the darkest Borgia mysteries. Lucrezia and the duke of Bisceglie had returned to Rome from Nepi, and that night, upon departing the papal palace after dinner, Bisceglie was set upon by a gang of armed men. Whether they intended to kill him or carry him away is not known, but Bisceglie resisted at sword’s point and was gravely injured in the ensuing fight. The attackers fled when palace guards heard the commotion and opened the gates. At Alexander’s instructions Bisceglie was carried to a room on the top floor of the new part of the papal palace known today as the Borgia Tower, and a round-the-clock guard was posted. Over the next five weeks, under the care of the pope’s own physicians and with Lucrezia and Sancia serving as nurses and guardians, he gradually regained his strength.

  Rome boiled with speculation about whose work the attack had been, and why. This time Cesare came under suspicion almost immediately. Apparently there had been bad blood between him and Bisceglie; this would have been nearly unavoidable as Cesare and Alexander allowed their old friendship with Naples and Spain to cool and drew close to France instead. The grapevine continued to hum with whispers about how, with Louis XII’s army likely to be moving on Naples soon, Bisceglie’s connection to the Borgias had become tiresomely inconvenient. Learning of this talk, Cesare declared cryptically that “I did not wound the duke, but if I had it would have been no more than he deserved.” Evidently Bisceglie himself believed Cesare to be guilty, though suspicion also focused, as at the time of Juan Borgia’s murder, on the Orsini. It was said that Bisceglie, in league with his family’s longtime allies the Colonna, had been plotting against the Orsini. This is no less plausible than any number of rival theories, including the one that had Cesare ordering the attack out of fear that Lucrezia’s happy marriage, and Alexander’s devotion to Lucrezia, would deter the pontiff from breaking with Naples. Or the suggestion that it was Bisceglie who had blocked Cesare from making Carlotta of Naples his wife, thereby incurring his hatred.

  What happened next was even more shocking but considerably less mysterious. On August 18 Lucrezia, Sancia, and Bisceglie’s visiting mother briefly left the convalescing duke alone, either to attend to some matter of household business or because someone—possibly Cesare—had called them away. Upon returning and finding the door blocked by armed men, the women ran to the pope for help. When at last they were admitted to Bisceglie’s bedchamber, they found him dead, strangled, it would be said, by a Spanish soldier named Miguel de Corella—Michelotto to the Italians, a longtime friend of Cesare’s but just now coming to prominence as his most trusted and devoted lieutenant. No reason has ever emerged for thinking this account of the crime to be untrue. Questions, however, remain. Why would Cesare have been so open in arranging the murder, in broad daylight and without any attempt at secrecy, of the husband of the sister whom, as his subsequent conduct would make it impossible to doubt, he loved more than anyone else? And does his responsibility for the murder mean that he must also have been responsible for the night attack on Bisceglie more than a month earlier?

  The search for answers has always been impeded by rumor and uncertainty—by reports, for example, that not long before the murder Bisceglie had gone for a walk in the papal gardens, seen the brother-in-law who he believed had tried to have him butchered, fired off a bolt from a crossbow in an impulsive attempt at revenge, and sent Cesare into a murderous rage by doing so. Among students of the Borgia story are some who find it impossible to believe that Cesare had anything to do with the first attempt on Bisceglie’s life, others who find it impossible to believe that he did not. As for the strangling, here it is depicted as a cold-blooded act of political calculation, there as a crime of blind passion. When everything known about Cesare is taken into account, it would appear more ch
aracteristic of him to have killed for a purpose than to have been carried away by a momentary surge of wrath. Still, as noted earlier, he was young and capable of impulsive behavior.

  The deepest mystery of all, assuming as we must that Cesare did have Bisceglie killed, is how his relationship with Lucrezia was not destroyed. If we could find the answer to that, it would take us to the heart of a connection that bound brother tightly to sister as long as both remained alive. The intensity of that connection was undoubtedly obvious to all who observed the two together and helps to explain why the allegations of incest that a bitter Giovanni Sforza first muttered when his marriage to Lucrezia was being dissolved took root and grew into a centuries-old legend of international reach.

  Whatever the answers to these questions, regardless of whether Cesare at any point had second thoughts or felt a pang of remorse (neither thing is easily imagined), the murder and the furor that followed did nothing to diminish his impatience to return to action. He was poised to respond when, just days after Bisceglie’s body was laid to rest, it became known that preparations for Louis XII’s move on Naples were under way at last. This put a whole new train of events in motion. Alexander and Cesare alike were quick to see that the situation was ripe for exploitation. It was Cesare, mainly, who set out to do the exploiting, pulling an uncertain pope along in his wake.

  He had two great advantages in this situation. The first was the papal soldiery, which if added to King Louis’s own troops would increase the size of the French army by at least a third. If used to resist Louis’s advance, on the other hand, it could be a serious problem. The other was the power of the pope to approve, or withhold approval of, Louis’s claim to the Neapolitan crown. Without this, even if he succeeded in taking Naples by force, Louis like Charles before him would be a usurper with no proper grounds for demanding the loyalty of the people of Naples or recognition by the other Italian states.

  The king’s need for the Borgias was therefore obvious enough, and his personal attachment to Cesare sufficiently well known, to have immediate impact. It caused the Venetians, eager to demonstrate their willingness to be cooperative, to confer on Cesare the honorary title gentiluomo di Venezi. In doing this they signaled that they had no intention of defending Pesaro, Rimini, or Faenza—all of them longtime Venetian protectorates—if Cesare moved against them. Just twelve days later, less than a week after the Bisceglie murder, a team of French commissioners arrived in Rome to lay out the terms on which Cesare could launch his next impresa and again receive French support. Louis was generous, offering Cesare the use of 7,700 fighting men and approving his plan to expand his signory, his lordship, across much or possibly all of the Romagna.

  The campaign that Cesare was preparing was going to be hellishly expensive—all the more so because he had made it his policy, from the point at which he first became a commander of troops, not only to pay and equip his men well but also—what was most unusual—always to pay them on time. Pope Alexander’s main role was simply to cover the costs—to funnel from the papal treasury the sums required to keep Cesare supplied with thousands of well-trained, well-equipped, and satisfied professional fighters. It is commonly said that in late September the pope gave his income a onetime boost of 120,000 ducats by selling, with the terms negotiated by Cesare, twelve seats in the College of Cardinals. In fact only ten cardinals were appointed at that time, and their identities make it doubtful that fund-raising was the primary reason for their promotion. Three of the ten were Spaniards, among them one of the Borgia Lanzols and a former teacher of Cesare’s. Among the six Italians were Alexander’s physician and a brother of the Gian Giacomo Trivulzio who as commander of Louis XII’s attack force had driven Ludovico Sforza out of Milan. Like the three appointments of six months earlier, which had conferred red hats on two Spaniards and a brother of Cesare’s wife, most of these men were more capable of tightening Borgia control over the Sacred College and winning favor with the kings of France and Spain than of paying great sums for their new rank. It is clear in any case that Cesare was left free to select the new cardinals, and that his choices, even if not made for cash, had more to do with politics than with the merits of the individuals so favored. He was, not to put too fine a point on it, packing the college with cronies.

  The ease with which Cesare’s slate of nominees was approved by the College of Cardinals, normally so opposed to attempts to increase its membership, shows how powerful he now was politically, and perhaps how feared. The same thing was shown again when emissaries arrived from the Romagnese city of Cesena and two of its neighboring towns and meekly begged Cesare to condescend to become their lord, their signore. The populations of these places were in effect giving themselves to him, seeking to spare themselves unpleasantness or worse by saving him the trouble of having to use force. In granting their petitions, Cesare substantially strengthened his position in the region between Bologna and the Adriatic coast without so much as leaving Rome.

  Further gains came quickly and with almost equal ease. When on October 2 Cesare embarked on his second impresa, he marched out of Rome at the head of an army of some ten thousand men. Waiting to join him in the Romagna was a force three-quarters that size provided by Louis XII. This was a terrifyingly large number of troops by the standards of the time, and Cesare made himself all the more frightening by telling no one what he intended to do. Florence felt threatened, all the more so because a delegation it had sent to Louis XII’s court—one of its members was a young civil servant named Niccolò Macchiavelli—had thus far not succeeded in securing either an alliance or assurances of protection. Even Bologna with all its wealth and power felt threatened, as did such comparatively minor states as Siena and Mantua. Those even smaller were engaged in a desperate search for potent allies and finding distressingly few. The great duchy of Milan, which under the Sforzas would have been happy to bring its neighbors under its protection in hope of turning them into dependencies, was now an instrument of France and therefore part of the threat. Venice, still mired in its war with the Turks, could not afford to offend, never mind resist, France and Rome combined.

  Cesare moved quickly and had startling success. His despised former brother-in-law Giovanni Sforza, alone since the fall of his cousins Ludovico il Moro and Caterina and mindful that nothing could induce his resentful subjects to risk themselves on his behalf, fled Pesaro again. He offered to sell the city to Venice and learned that Venice was not interested at any price. It was much the same with Rimini, twenty miles farther up the coast: Roberto Malatesta’s son Pandolfo departed in haste after finding it impossible to rally a defense. When a bishop sent by Cesare arrived to demand Rimini’s submission, its citizens hurried to welcome him.

  The only place to offer resistance was Faenza, a small but thriving city midway between Caterina Sforza’s former strongholds of Imola and Forlì. Its location made it a prize that Cesare needed to complete his control of the Via Emilia. Long the domain of the Manfredi family, Faenza in 1500 had as its lord the eighteen-year-old Astorre Manfredi, a charismatic figure who spurned the demands of Cesare’s envoys and was supported by the people of the town. Cesare, whose capture of Pesaro had added twenty cannons to his already considerable strength in artillery, brought Faenza under siege on November 10. A long, hard struggle appeared to be in the offing, but Cesare had sufficient resources to attack other targets while proceeding with the tedious business of reducing Faenza’s rocca to rubble.

  On November 11, however, another stunning development rearranged the political landscape yet again. Those two old rivals Ferdinand of Spain and Louis of France, already bound together in a fragile truce of convenience, now agreed via the Treaty of Granada to divide the kingdom of Naples between them. Louis was to get Il Regno’s northern provinces including the capital city and with it the Neapolitan crown. Ferdinand’s share for turning on his cousin Don Fadrique and recognizing Louis’s right to Milan would be the southern provinces of Apulia and Calabria. It was a sensible enough arrangement as far as it
went. Louis could march his troops down the peninsula from Milan without having to set foot on territory claimed by Spain. Ferdinand would be able to move troops into his part of the sundered kingdom from nearby Sicily, again without risking collision with his new partner in crime. Each got the satisfaction of knowing that he would soon be master of half of Naples without having to fight the other.

  Much like the earlier arrangement by which France and Venice agreed to share Milan’s holdings on the Lombard Plain but on a larger scale, this deal created a combination so overwhelmingly powerful that all the states of Italy could have no hope of resisting it even if they somehow managed to unite. It removed any possibility that Naples—and Italy—might be saved by playing the two great powers off against each other. Thus it stripped Alexander of any lingering hope of impeding Louis as he had earlier helped to undo Charles VIII. Under these new circumstances a refusal to recognize Louis as king of Naples would have been not only an empty gesture but a potentially suicidal one. The only hope for an autonomous Italy lay in the inherent instability of the alliance. It required two proud, ambitious, and shrewd monarchs, hardened cynics who had never trusted each other and were obviously not going to begin doing so now, to share a great prize that neither really thought he should have to share with anyone. But all this was going to take time to play itself out. In the near term Naples as an independent state was doomed, and no one could do anything to save it.

  The certainty that he would soon be on his way to Naples focused Louis XII’s attention on central Italy with new intensity. It brought home to him the importance of securing the hundreds of miles separating Milan from Naples—miles over which he was going to have to move his troops. Obviously he wanted the states that lay along his path to be incapable of opposing him if not positively friendly, and the surest way to achieve that was to make them dependent. This required keeping any of them from becoming strong enough to act independently, and all of them divided against one another. From this point forward, these were the considerations that shaped the French king’s dealings with the Borgias. He wanted the use of the papal army, and he wanted no trouble from the Vatican, but from now on there would be strict limits to how much he was willing to pay. And if he found Cesare more appealing than the other princes of Italy, he also understood that allowing Cesare to grow too strong could be a painfully costly mistake.