The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  Canon law, essential to the Church’s cohesion and coherence, kept alive the old imperial notion that some rules were important enough to apply to every part of the community. The sending out of cardinals as papal legates to all parts of Europe, though these envoys were generally expected to achieve some specific purpose and return to Rome when they had done so, put in place the first rudiments of diplomatic representation to be seen since classical times. A special vocabulary came into general use: legatus became the name for anyone sent to represent someone else, a nuncio was a person authorized to deliver messages only, a procurator (later plenipotentiary) was a senior emissary empowered to negotiate on behalf of his master.

  Systematic diplomacy ceased to be the exclusive province of the Church early in the fifteenth century, as a direct result of what was happening in Italy. Beyond the Alps the German empire had become a shambles, and France and Spain had not yet pulled themselves together into the dominating powers that they would soon become. But in Italy the expulsion of the Holy Roman emperors had left a vacuum that was being filled, as we saw earlier, by a multitude of more or less new, more or less autonomous city-states. The leaders among these states—Milan, Florence, Venice—were not only the most advanced in the Western world economically and culturally, they were also secular, lacking a religion-based legitimacy in a way that was quite novel. Asked to justify the power that they possessed, those leaders could have pointed to little more than the naked force with which they kept domestic rivals in submission and external enemies out.

  Being geographically small, the new Italian states existed in close proximity to one another. This, and the insecurities arising out of their lack of legitimacy, contributed to their being often at war. Much more than in the north of Europe, where the distances between the capitals of the greatest kingdoms were so great as to make regime-threatening surprise attacks difficult if not impossible, in Italy the warlords needed to be constantly on guard, ready to react on short notice. They needed to know not only what their neighbors were doing but what they were thinking. This gave rise to the idea of sending representatives, in due course to be called ambassadors, to take up permanent residence in the capitals of states deemed sufficiently significant to warrant the attendant costs. A prime purpose of these representatives was to send home a more or less continuous stream of whatever information—or gossip—they were able to pick up.

  Milan was first. Under the Visconti it grew rich enough to invest in new channels of communication, and the ambitions of its dukes stirred up so much trouble that staying informed became essential. As early as the 1420s Milan had a kind of vestigial foreign office managing a small stable of emissaries to some of the more important Italian capitals, and as the usefulness of this arrangement became apparent, it attracted imitators. Europe’s first treatise on diplomatic practice appeared in 1436, just a year after what is sometimes called the first international peace conference of the modern era succeeded in resolving, via the Treaty of Arras, a long-standing conflict between France and Burgundy. Before another two decades passed, Milan, Naples, Venice, and Florence all had permanent embassies in one another’s capitals as well as in Rome.

  The papal court remained central, the hub of the West’s farthest-reaching and most sophisticated diplomatic network, the place that the other states could least afford to ignore. Rome became therefore the center of diplomatic scheming and counterscheming, the best information exchange in Europe, the place where every ambitious young diplomat wanted to be sent. Somewhat curiously—perhaps, with foreign agents clustering around them, they saw no need—no pope before Alexander VI sent permanent ambassadors to other courts. Alexander began doing so in the mid-1490s under pressure of the French invasion. He first posted a nuncio at the court of the German emperor, then established permanent representation in Spain, and finally in 1500 did the same in France and Venice.

  The start of the Italian Wars, especially the creation of the Holy League of 1495 and its success in driving Charles VIII out of Italy, showed the outside powers the value of the new system. Ferdinand of Spain, though never easily separated from a gold ducat, nevertheless was early to see the light. In short order he found it worthwhile to establish embassies at Rome, Venice, London, Brussels, and the German emperor’s court. Before the end of Alexander’s reign all the major powers were doing the same.

  19

  Settling Scores

  On October 7, with the rebellion of a number of Cesare’s conquered towns in full flower and the extent of the conspiracy against him just coming into focus, Machiavelli arrived at Imola. He had been sent, as before, in response to a message from Cesare saying that he had important matters to discuss. The fact that he traveled alone this time, as a “special envoy” rather than as part of a full-fledged embassy headed by a senior official, reflected the confidence of Florence’s government that now it really was under the protection of France, and that it had little to fear from someone as beset with troubles as the young Borgia upstart.

  The Ten, the council that managed Florence’s relations with other states, had instructed Machiavelli not to offer Cesare assistance of any kind or do anything that might even suggest an alliance. He was to request safe passage through the Romagna for Florentine merchants—an important issue, but not of the highest urgency under current circumstances—and offer Cesare asylum. This last may have been intended as a subtle insult, implying as it did that Cesare was or soon might be in need of refuge and that Florence, the tables having turned, was strong enough to provide it. Machiavelli’s real purpose, in any case, was obvious. It was to stay as close to Cesare as possible and gather as much information as he could. It was not a mission that he welcomed—he wanted to be in Florence, at home—and almost as soon as he was settled in Imola, he began asking for permission to return. His requests were ignored, and almost his only consolation was the surprising amount of access he was granted to the similarly idle Cesare. Though nothing in the way of business was accomplished, Machiavelli having no authority to do or propose anything, with each new encounter he was impressed afresh. What struck him above all was Cesare’s cool self-confidence, his ability to remain clearheaded and at ease even as his political and military situation appeared to be collapsing. He was not only calm but in high spirits. The offer of asylum he shrugged aside, without taking offense and nearly without comment.

  Machiavelli might have been less surprised by his host’s sangfroid if he had been as well informed as Cesare was about the general state of affairs. He didn’t know, when he arrived at Imola, that Cesare was aware that his disloyal condottieri had recently asked the Ten for help and been refused. This soon became clear, however: without disclosing anything of his own plans, Cesare revealed his understanding that the Florentine government could never have supported the plotters—would have found it impossible to do so even if the conspiracy had not been dominated by such deadly enemies of the republic as Vitellozzo Vitelli and the Orsini. Any move in that direction would have risked alienating Louis of France, Florence’s sole and indispensable protector.

  Cesare knew that Venice too had been asked to assist the conspirators and had likewise turned them away. And he understood its reasons for doing so. La Serenissima, trapped in its life-or-death struggle with the Turks, was in far too much need of papal and French help—or of their neutrality, at an absolute minimum—to consider taking sides against the Borgias. Its leading merchants, focused as always on protecting the Mediterranean trading routes that were the wellspring of their wealth, had little experience of the condottieri who had turned on Cesare and no reason to loathe them as the Florentines did. But they also could see no reason to want them to succeed. If the fragmentation of the Romagna had for centuries helped the Venetians to feel secure on their mainland frontier, and if the consolidation of the region under Cesare was no cause for celebration, nevertheless it would have been folly to throw in with an unstable coalition of rogues formed for the sole purpose of destroying Cesare Borgia. Such a step could only make an
implacable enemy of the pope, stir up trouble with France, and secure the futures of some of the worst men in Italy. These things were unthinkable.

  And a roguish lot the conspirators definitely were. That would be their damning weakness: the fact that they were, many and even most of them, of such repellent character as to be incapable not only of winning outside support but even of trusting one another. Throughout the generations when fratricide was almost commonplace among tyrant families, the Baglioni of Perugia had murdered one another with a frequency that was startling even to their contemporaries. Dubious paternity was so commonplace in the family as to make it uncertain that the Baglioni of 1502, current clan leader Gian Paolo included, were in fact descended from the ones who had first made themselves masters of Perugia a century before.

  Tall and blond with striking good looks, at age thirty-two Gian Paolo was as practiced as any of his forebears in using force and terror to keep his subjects subdued. While it is unlikely that he could have been guilty of all the outrages of which his enemies accused him, he was undoubtedly capable of cruelty on an epic scale. On several occasions he had men whom he had decided were his foes, more than a few of them clearly innocent of any offense, hanged en masse because doing so suited either his political purposes or his whim at the moment. Machiavelli, who described him as “a man who cohabited with his sister, and had massacred his cousins and his nephews,” would in later years condemn him not for his crimes but for lacking the resolve to murder a sixteenth-century pope when he had him, briefly, in his power.

  Even worse—improbable as that may seem—was Oliverotto Euffreducci. At twenty-seven he was lord of the unfortunate city of Fermo by virtue of having murdered the uncle who raised him and always treated him generously. He had started his career soldiering in the service of Gian Paolo Baglioni, attaching himself to Vitellozzo Vitelli after the former’s execution. Like the Vitelli and Baglioni he richly deserved the label tyrant, having terrorized the people of Fermo into dumb submission. Alone among his henchmen he has never had a single defender, anyone willing to suggest that he had redeeming qualities of any kind, even physical courage. Cesare Borgia’s best biographer, W. H. Woodward, described Oliverotto as a “harebrained adventurer” who was not so much feared or even distrusted by his associates as simply despised. Machiavelli, in writing about him, plumbed the same depths of cynicism reached in his description of Baglioni, scorning him not for murdering women and children but for lacking the cunning required for survival.

  Then there was Pandolfo Petrucci, lord of Siena, at fifty the oldest of the conspirators. He was sufficiently superior in cunning and intelligence to emerge as perhaps the closest thing they had to a leader, but he was also a vicious sadist. He had achieved supreme power in Siena by murdering his father-in-law (who was probably, it must in fairness be noted, plotting to murder him first) and is best remembered for one of his favorite forms of amusement. He loved to roll boulders down on low-lying parts of Siena from the heights above, howling with delight at the resulting devastation.

  The weak and gullible Paolo Orsini was among the conspirators as well. And the devious Cardinal Orsini, he of the thousand tricks, along with his slippery brother Giulio. And Gian Giordano Orsini, who had been thrown into a Neapolitan prison with his father Virginio at the time of Charles VIII’s withdrawal and was quietly awaiting his chance to avenge the old man’s miserable death. Such was the vipers’ tangle that was in league against Cesare: an assortment of sociopaths and psychopaths famous not just for ruthlessness, not just for a readiness to torture and murder the innocent, but for a willingness to betray their own blood. The one conspicuous exception was the recently deposed, even more recently restored Guidobaldo da Montefeltro. Adoring son of a majestic father, loved by the people of Urbino for his gentleness and kindness and admired by artists and scholars for his refinement, he was badly out of place in this affair and not taken seriously even by his partners. His prestige among such savages was not enhanced by rumors—almost certainly true—that he was sexually impotent, a fact that adds poignancy to his loving relationship with his wife, Francesco Gonzaga’s sister Elisabetta.

  Repulsive as they were on the whole, the confederates almost certainly could have overcome Cesare if they had moved quickly, firmly, and in concert. They proved to be incapable of doing any such thing. No real leader emerged to keep them together and focused. It would be said later that Cardinal Orsini had been the driving force behind the conspiracy, and Petrucci of Siena is sometimes described as its brains, but neither demonstrated the kind of mastery that the situation required. Not one of them had an objective loftier than his own survival and perhaps that of his family; almost all would cheerfully have sacrificed the others for his own sake, and they knew one another well enough to understand this. Such things might have been manageable if they had faced a less formidable adversary. But Cesare understood them and their vulnerabilities at least as well as they understood themselves, and he was both clever enough to outwit them and tough enough to undo them.

  From his base at Imola, almost certainly drawing on a secret source of intelligence inside the enemy camp, Cesare played on the conspirators’ divisions and aggravated their fears. Early on he had identified Paolo Orsini as the weakest and most seducible of his adversaries. He surreptitiously got word to Paolo of his willingness to forgive and forget, to allow the condottieri to return to his payroll while demanding nothing of consequence in return. When Paolo shared this offer with his fellow plotters at one of their gatherings at Magione, they showed more interest than was wise in a group of men who had already thrown down the gauntlet to a dangerous enemy, and Paolo was authorized to explore the matter further. In Rome, Pope Alexander opened parallel negotiations with the city’s leading Orsini and found that they too were receptive. From Siena, meanwhile, Pandolfo Petrucci sent Cesare an almost craven message, earnestly assuring him that he had never intended to displease. Wherever the Borgias tested the resolve of the men plotting against them, they found weakness and a readiness to cut deals—even separate deals, when that seemed feasible. They could be confident that in a showdown each of the conspirators would look to his own immediate interests regardless of the fate of the others.

  They had reason to be worried all the same. The risings south of the Romagna, and the fact that Cesare was all but trapped at Imola, left Alexander feeling deeply insecure. He feared that everything the two of them had achieved and were planning to achieve, the whole grand enterprise into which he was pouring the wealth of the papacy, was suddenly on the verge of collapse. He complained of Cesare’s incessant demands for money and of the meager results his own generosity appeared to be producing. Carried on the grapevine, his lamentations must have boosted the confidence of the rebels.

  Cesare by contrast waited and watched in silence, using his own inscrutability to unnerve his enemies. When Ermes Bentivoglio moved his troops near the outskirts of Imola but failed to provoke the expected countermove by Cesare, failed even to get an acknowledgment of his presence, he lost heart and withdrew in befuddlement. When it became certain that the plotters could expect no help from Venice or Florence, and that when Louis XII’s army arrived on the scene it would come as Cesare’s friend, their resolve disintegrated. Cesare meanwhile was continuing to receive infusions of gold from a pope too worried to tighten his purse strings, and he was using them to hire new condottieri and send agents into Lombardy to recruit fighters. He was able to keep his troops well paid, well provisioned, and loyal. Week by week, quietly, he was rebuilding his strength.

  He and Machiavelli filled their idle hours with each other’s company. Though Cesare persisted in revealing little of what he knew and nothing of what he intended, his reticence only increased Machiavelli’s admiration of what he called, in explaining to his exasperated superiors why he had so little of value to report, his host’s “most commendable secrecy.” More impressed than ever with Cesare’s perceptiveness and ability to make difficult decisions quickly, he advised the Ten that as
things stood, it would be folly for Florence to put itself openly at odds with such a resourceful political player.

  Late in October, with the unraveling of the conspiracy too far advanced to remain secret, a nervous Paolo Orsini showed up in Imola in disguise. He was eager to cut a deal, Cesare was happy to oblige him so long as the terms put him in a commanding position, and so a conditional agreement was worked out. When Paolo carried it back to Magione, however, it drew a mixed response. Cesare’s sole hard demand was that the two cities of Urbino and Camerino—the homes of the Montefeltri and the Varani—must be returned to him. By and large, the conspirators who were not lords of either of those two cities, though no doubt less than delighted, found this a small enough price for their own deliverance. Though Vitelli and Baglioni at first poured scorn on the idea of trusting Cesare after having been so obviously bent on his destruction, and though their reptilian protégé Oliverotto lined up with them as usual, nobody else agreed, and the three gradually abandoned their objections.

  Bentivoglio of Bologna, however, refused to be won over. As did Guidobaldo of Urbino—understandably so, as the terms on offer made him the principal sacrificial lamb. But the deal was accepted, the plotters took up once again their condotta with Cesare, and Guidobaldo was ordered to depart. Soon after, in making his second forced departure from the city his father had devoted his life to transforming, he would be heard to cry out to God, asking why such a fate had been visited upon him. As for whether Cesare’s demand for possession of Urbino and Camerino was in any way justified, it should be remembered that, in hostile hands, the two cities would have been ideal platforms from which to threaten the Romagna. As soon as the Varani were gone from Camerino, the pope declared it a duchy and bestowed it upon the same mysterious little Giovanni Borgia, the so-called Infant of Rome, who was already duke of Nepi. Further evidence that he was—perhaps—Cesare’s son.