The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  In the end, thanks to the intervention of Louis XII, even Bentivoglio was persuaded to make peace. The king, wanting no disputes that might complicate the pursuit of his own goals, wanting also to retain the friendship of the pope and the use of his army without alienating a city as strategically situated as Bologna, arranged a settlement aimed at giving something to everyone. Bologna once again joined Florence in being under French protection and off limits to Cesare. In return, Bentivoglio was obliged once again to pledge a substantial payment in gold to Cesare and provide him with troops.

  The conspiracy having been brought to an unsuccessful conclusion, its target and its instigators presumably reconciled, Cesare was once again eager to take the field. Machiavelli, however, came down with a fever as winter tightened its grip on the Romagnese plain, and found himself living in wretchedly constrained circumstances because Florence was neglecting to send his pay while Imola and the surrounding countryside were being picked clean by Cesare’s troops and camp followers. He sent letter after letter begging to be allowed to return home, where obligations including children, a young wife, and a widowed mother required his attention. The signori replied that he was needed where he was.

  On December 10, when Cesare led his army of twelve thousand men out of Imola through a driving snowstorm, several of the former plotters were once again with him, commanding his troops. The disheartened Machiavelli, however, reported himself too ill to go along. He followed a few days later, and on December 14 caught up with the others at Cesena after a ride of thirty miles down the Via Emilia. They were still at Cesena six days later when Cesare sprang his latest surprise, suddenly ordering the French cavalry that formed the core of his force to depart for Milan and rejoin Louis XII. At a stroke he thus radically reduced the size of his army and stripped it of its best troops, and as usual he declined to explain himself. One plausible explanation is that France’s men-at-arms were simply too expensive to maintain—that in dismissing them Cesare was responding to the pope’s complaints about costs. Another is that he had seen enough of the brutish behavior of the foreigners and had decided that if he didn’t bring it to an end, he could never hope to be accepted by the populations whose lord he intended to remain. A third hypothesis, no less credible and much more intriguing in light of the events of the next three weeks, is that by sending away so many of the troops most likely to remain loyal to him, he was showing Vitelli, the Orsini, and the others that he trusted them and that they had nothing to fear.

  He was still at Cesena on Christmas morning, when the townsfolk awoke to find a decapitated body on display in their central piazza. It was the corpse of the hated Ramiro de Lorqua, long one of Cesare’s most important henchmen. Its head was impaled on an upright lance, an executioner’s ax on the ground beside it. There was no need for speculation about whose work this was. Just three days before, Lorqua had been summoned to Cesena from his post at Rimini, and when he arrived, Cesare had had him placed under arrest. Thereafter he had been under interrogation, and almost certainly under torture, and evidently had revealed some dark things indeed.

  Lorqua (known variously to the Italians as Lorca, de Orca, and d’Orco) had always been excessively zealous, not to say bloodthirsty, in the execution of his duties. His status as a Borgia insider is apparent in the role he had played in the negotiation of Lucrezia’s marriage to Alfonso d’Este. There had been signs of trouble even then, however: vague tales of how he had angered Cesare by somehow behaving inappropriately while escorting Lucrezia to her new life in Ferrara. More recently his rough methods as vicar-general of the Romagna had caused Cesare to demote him to Rimini, where he was now said to be enriching himself through extortion and pillage. His execution, though never explained, sent unmistakable messages. In the most forceful terms imaginable, it demonstrated to the inhabitants of the Romagna that their new duke regarded Lorqua’s misconduct as intolerable. It reinforced the signal that Cesare had sent his subjects when he placed the honest and conscientious Antonio di Monte Sansovino in charge, first in the Romagna and then elsewhere as well. Even before Lorqua’s death, Sansovino had been sent to Urbino to announce a general pardon of all who had opposed Cesare and the restoration of all the rights the population had enjoyed under the Montefeltri. Such acts were calming the conquered territories. In the Romagna especially, with its long history of misrule, they were giving the population more reasons than ever to be grateful for Cesare’s invasion.

  The killing of Lorqua also helped to assuage whatever fears the former conspirators might still have felt. In part simply because he was a Spaniard, but more because of his undisguised contempt for all things Italian, Lorqua had been hated by Cesare’s Italian condottieri. That he had known Cesare far longer than any of the warlords, and appeared to be closer to him than any of his other fellow Spaniards except Michelotto, made him greatly feared as well. His dramatic elimination, like the dismissal of the French troops, was a vivid demonstration of just how ruthless Cesare was capable of being. But it also gave Vitelli and the others reason to believe that Cesare had cast his lot irrevocably with them rather than with the French or even his old comrades from Spain.

  As always, Cesare kept his secrets. Among those secrets were the things that Lorqua had revealed after his arrest—things of which Cesare may have already been informed by his secret agent inside the Orsini camp but that now could be taken as certain. Lorqua, resentful of his demotion, aware that he was out of favor and fearful of what that might portend, had entered into an improbable alliance with the members of the anti-Cesare conspiracy. Together they had begun hatching new schemes for preemptively ridding themselves of Cesare. The knowledge that he was again being plotted against explains everything that Cesare would do over the next six days. It also explains why, at exactly this point and for the first time, he began wearing a shirt of chain mail night and day.

  Nevertheless, when Cesare left Cesena on December 26, he took with him only a single company of personal guards, dividing the bulk of his remaining army into units that were spread out across the landscape and ordered to proceed separately. Again he was showing his captains that he trusted them, that he was comfortable enough not to require strong protection and posed no threat to them. When Oliverotto volunteered to go on ahead with enough men to secure the coastal town of Senigallia, Cesare gave his consent. Senigallia, a papal vicariate, was held in defiance of Alexander VI by the widow of Giovanni della Rovere, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere’s brother, on behalf of her young son. Machiavelli was again traveling with Cesare, sensing as everyone did that something momentous was in the air. After a march of some forty miles southward along the coast they paused at Lucrezia’s old home of Pesaro, where they received word that Oliverotto had taken Senigallia and was preparing it for Cesare’s arrival. Two easy marches more, one of just six miles and another of a dozen, found them passing through Senigallia’s gates on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. On hand to welcome them were Oliverotto, Vitelli, and Paolo and Francesco Orsini. They did what they could to make it a triumphal occasion.

  Which is how it came to pass that Machiavelli was in Senigallia when, an hour or two after midnight on the first day of 1503, Vitellozzo and Oliverotto were strangled by Cesare’s constant companion, Michelotto Corella. He used a violin string. Vitelli, it was said, begged to be allowed to live long enough to ask the pope for an indulgence that would spare him from divine punishment for his sins. Oliverotto whined and wept and blamed Vitelli for everything.

  Later that same short winter day, when Cesare marched his troops out of Senigallia once again heading south, Machiavelli was as before part of the procession. So were three Orsini—Paolo, the young Francesco duke of Gravina, and a kinsman of theirs named Roberto, a member of the family’s Pitigliano branch. But they were Cesare’s prisoners now, not commanders of his troops, and they were manacled and under close guard. Back in Rome, having been advised by Cesare that aggressive action would be called for starting on New Year’s Day, Alexander was filling his prisons with
as many Orsini as could be rounded up. Cardinal Orsini was in the cell where he would soon die, his palace stripped and his aged mother left to wander the streets alone, unable to find anyone not too frightened to offer her food or shelter. What was in process was not just war against the Orsini but a war of extermination.

  At last, in the second week of January, Machiavelli received permission to return home. He would not see Cesare again until nine months had passed. They would meet next in Rome, in October, by which time Cesare would be once more in crisis, beset by dangers far beyond anything encountered in Imola or elsewhere, in 1502 or at any other point in his young life.

  Background

  THE GREAT DISCOVERIES

  EVENTS THAT TRULY CHANGE THE WORLD—THAT CHANGE IT IN fundamental ways—don’t come along every year. In Europe, before the Industrial Revolution, they didn’t often happen once a century.

  It is therefore more than remarkable that two such events happened within a span of five and a half years in the middle of the reign of Pope Alexander VI. The first came in March 1493, when Christopher Columbus returned to Spain after an absence of seven months to report that he had just succeeded in sailing to Asia (which is where he thought he had been). Then, in September 1499, Vasco da Gama dropped anchor at Lisbon and announced that in the course of a voyage that had taken twenty-six months he had done what no one could have imagined doing not many years before. He had rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, crossed the Indian Ocean, reached the west coast of India with its limitless supplies of spices and other precious goods, and returned alive to tell the tale.

  Also remarkable is how interconnected these two events were—so much so that they nearly brought Spain and Portugal to war with each other. And how it was Alexander, more than anyone in Spain or Portugal, who did what was needed to keep the peace.

  Though ultimately the less momentous of the two voyages—it didn’t lead to the discovery of two vast and previously unsuspected continents—da Gama’s was the more impressive achievement. And in the near term its results were more dramatic. It was the culmination of almost a hundred years of effort by the Portuguese royal family to promote and underwrite exploration of the unknown parts of the world. The persistence with which this program of exploration was pursued generation after generation, and the financial risks and sacrifices that it entailed, would make the global network of colonies that came to Portugal as a result about as close to being earned as it is possible for an empire to be.

  It began with a son and brother of Portuguese kings who, though he personally rarely traveled and never explored anything, is rightly known to history as Prince Henry the Navigator. In 1415, a time when in all Europe there was little knowledge of astronomy or mathematics and seafarers tried to stay within sight of shore because otherwise they had dangerously little way of knowing their location or even their direction of travel, he founded a school dedicated to the development of sailors more skilled than any in Europe. By the time of his death in 1460 Portugal had such sailors in abundance. The boldest of them had journeyed far down the west coast of Africa, establishing trading stations along the way and bases on the Canary Islands, the Azores, and Madeira in the Atlantic. They had done so in ships developed under Henry’s sponsorship, the fast and nimble little caravels. He had gone to extraordinary lengths to encourage his explorers, providing and outfitting their ships, giving them an equal share in any profits from trade or plunder while making good any losses out of his own pocket.

  Magnificent as these achievements were, they had a tragically dark side. The Portuguese captains, always on the lookout for financial gain, found that even the poorest sections of the African coast offered a nearly unlimited supply of human beings who could be transported to the north and profitably sold. Thus traffic in slaves, a feature of the European and Mediterranean worlds from time immemorial, became almost from the beginning a central characteristic of the Great Age of Discovery.

  Henry’s work was carried on by his nephew King Afonso V, who introduced a licensing arrangement under which a Lisbon merchant was given exclusive trading rights from Guinea southward in return for exploring another four hundred miles of coastline every year. In such ways the Portuguese continued to push on into the unknown, and the late 1480s brought the greatest triumph yet: ships out of Lisbon reached what they named the Cape of Storms (the king, not wishing to discourage the less bold, changed it to the Cape of Good Hope) and entered the Indian Ocean. News of this, when it reached Portugal, electrified the royal court. It was for the first time certain that Ptolemy had been wrong, in the second century AD, when he wrote that a bridge of land blocked access to the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic. It was not impossible to sail from the Iberian peninsula to India.

  This was a stunning prospect. An increasingly wealthy Europe had for generations been developing an insatiable appetite for the exotic products of India, China, and other points east—especially for the spices grown in these places. But it was able to procure them in severely limited quantities only and at exorbitant prices. These prices were the result of rarity and monopoly control: all the produce of the Orient, after it reached the bustling ports of India’s west coast, was in the hands of Arab traders who transported it by ship through the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea and then overland by caravan to the ports of the eastern Mediterranean. These merchants took big slices of profit at every stage, and at Alexandria and other ports they sold their merchandise to the Venetians and Genoese, who marked it up again in carrying it to Italy and other European markets.

  There was a bonanza to be reaped by sailing from Lisbon directly to India, thereby eliminating all the middlemen. And so the Portuguese government, having established that it could be done, hurried to organize the expedition that set sail under Vasco da Gama’s command in July 1497 and reached the Indian city of Calicut in May 1498. When it returned home in September 1499, it was laden with pepper, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, and cinnamon—things nearly as precious as gold. Another, much bigger expedition was readied with all possible speed, and thus was Portugal’s global empire born. It undermined the advantages long enjoyed by Venice and the Arabs and began what gradually became a prodigious redistribution of wealth and national power.

  By the time da Gama completed his great voyage, Columbus was midway through his third visit to what he would die thinking was the eastern edge of Asia. His exploits could have been another great triumph for Portugal, but in the 1480s, after hearing Columbus out, a council of experts decided that his plan to reach the Far East by sailing west was impossible. They therefore refused his request for the financing of an expedition. (The council was right and Columbus was wrong, by the way. Its members knew, as did all educated people of the time, that the world was a sphere, and they knew also that it was a much bigger sphere than Columbus believed. He argued that Asia was four thousand miles west of the Canary Islands. His judges found that ridiculous. They judged correctly, but without knowing that between the Canaries and Asia lay North and South America. No ship of the time could cover the required distance before all hands had died on board.)

  Columbus, Genoese by birth, then spent years trying to sell his idea to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. He had no success until 1492, when their conquest of Granada put the royal couple in an expansive frame of mind, prompting them to provide him with three ships and crews made up largely of convicted criminals. He departed Spain on August 3 of that year, launched into the unknown on September 6 after a stop in the Canaries, and by early October was cruising among the islands of the Caribbean.

  King John of Portugal was so offended by Spain’s apparent success in finding a new route to the quasi-mythic lands known to Europe as Cathay (China), Cipango (Japan), and India, so certain that the Spanish had no right to impinge upon his kingdom’s hard-earned monopoly, that he began preparations to send a Portuguese fleet across the Atlantic to lay claim to what was rightfully his. Learning of this, Ferdinand and Isabella began assembling a war fleet of their own, simultan
eously appealing to Rome for a vindication of their rights. The result was a series of four papal bulls, the third of which, Inter Caetera of May 4, 1493, granted to the kingdom of Castile all discoveries more than one hundred leagues west of the Atlantic’s Cape Verde Islands. Everything east of that point went to the Portuguese. It was a stopgap solution, “league” being an ambiguous unit of measure and no one really knowing how to measure great stretches of longitude, but it averted war. A year later, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, Spain sought to assuage continuing Portuguese anger by agreeing to move the line of demarcation another 250 leagues to the west. This would lead to further momentous consequences when, in 1500, a fleet of Portuguese merchant ships en route to the Cape of Good Hope swung far to the west and happened upon the coast of Brazil. Because of the settlement that Alexander had negotiated, this vast rich land, though part of the South American continent, would for the next three centuries belong to Portugal and not Spain.

  20

  Man of Destiny

  On January 18, 1503, moving slowly as he entered the hills of eastern Tuscany so as to give his troops time to ravage the towns and farmsteads that had the misfortune to lie in their path, Cesare finally had his prisoners Paolo and Francesco Orsini strangled. As at Senigallia the deed was done by Michelotto, quietly, and it reflected the hard fact that the war on the Orsini had passed the point of no return—the point at which too much damage had been done for reconciliation to be conceivable. What provoked comment was not so much the killings themselves—they were colorless events compared with what was happening in and around Rome—as Cesare’s mysterious release of his third Orsini prisoner, an obscure figure known as Roberto of Pitigliano. This answered the question, people said, of how Cesare had kept himself so well informed throughout the conspiracy that had nearly undone him. Obviously, they said, this Roberto had been Cesare’s secret agent, his prime source of intelligence. And now he had his reward.