The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  The body of another of Alexander’s close associates, Jacopo da Santa Croce, was found one morning on one of the Tiber bridges. People were reminded of the discovery, on a morning in the Romagna many months before, of the body of Cesare’s man Lorqua. Was this too a message of some kind? If so, what was the message? And who was it for? Who, for that matter, was sending it? Could Cesare possibly be sending anonymous signals to the pope? None of the proffered answers was particularly convincing. The atmosphere in Rome was growing dark and ominous.

  Word circulated—supposedly leaked out of the Vatican—that the pope was negotiating with Maximilian of Hapsburg, the Holy Roman emperor-elect, to have Pisa, Siena, and Lucca all bestowed on Cesare as imperial fiefs. Which would have been interesting, even meaningful, if the emperor were in a position to do anything in Italy. But he had little enough power north of the Alps, thanks to the political fragmentation of Germany, and absolutely none farther south.

  It was said too that Louis XII was offering to give all of Naples to Cesare in trade for the Romagna and Bologna. Which might have made sense if the king were in possession of Naples, which he no longer was. Or if Cesare had any voice at all in the status of Bologna, which of course he didn’t.

  At the furthest extreme of absurdity, it was said finally that Alexander was talking with Venice about having Cesare elected pope. The variety and increasing improbability of these stories is less reflective of anything actually happening than of the prevailing confusion and fear.

  Behind all the nonsense, however, lay one monumental reality. Circumstances and his own actions had converged to raise Cesare above every other prince in Italy, kings from the outside of course excluded. As the summer of 1503 began, everything seemed to be—and in fact almost everything was—working in his favor. The city of Rome and its nobles, the papal bureaucracy, the College of Cardinals—all had been subdued and were under Cesare’s control either directly or through the pope. The baronial clans that for centuries had been the bane of every pope had been beaten, scattered, slaughtered. The tyrants who until recently had ruled city after city across the Papal States were mostly dead or in exile; only the Ferrara of the Este and the Bologna of the Bentivoglio were not yet under Borgia rule. Ferdinand of Spain had no need to interfere with Cesare, Louis of France no wish to offend him or the pope. Cesare had an army under Michelotto encamped at Perugia awaiting orders, and he was at liberty to do with it almost anything he wished.

  Cesare spent most of July in the Romagna, making preparations for whatever it was he intended to do next. Early in the month he had assembled his cavalry, including newly hired units of Albanian light horse for which he clearly had big plans, for a grand review in which he himself rode proudly at the head of the lead squadron and Michelotto led the second. Three days later Alexander appointed him vicar in perpetuity of the late Vitellozzo Vitelli’s old home base of Città di Castello. This made Cesare lord of a substantial city at the very edge of Florentine territory, a good platform for a move against Florence itself. It seemed yet another provocation, deliberate if oblique, of Louis XII.

  At the start of August, with all in readiness but his intentions as secret as ever, Cesare made a visit to Rome. He found the city in the grip of one of the stifling midsummer heat waves for which it has always been notorious. The pope was in residence, having found it impossible to withdraw to the cool of the hills with so much going on, but Cesare found him in robust good health and his old high spirits. All Rome was electric with expectation; La Trémoille’s troops were known to be in Tuscany and on their way south, which meant that the next showdown between France and Spain was imminent. Fever was rampant in the city and indeed in the Vatican, as was to be expected in Rome at this time of year. Among its victims was one of Alexander’s oldest friends, the elder of the two cardinals named Giovanni Lanzol Borgia. “It is a bad month for us fat people,” the pope ruefully observed as a procession took his cousin’s body to its grave.

  On August 5 a Vatican regular named Adriano Castelli da Corneto, a onetime secretary to the pope and one of the latest crop of new cardinals, gave a party at his hillside vineyard in Rome. Alexander attended, as did Cesare; probably it was a going-away party organized in the latter’s honor.

  No doubt it was an afternoon of good food, good wine, the jollity with which the Borgias always spiced social occasions, and—especially as the sun began to set—swarms of river-bred mosquitoes. It certainly was among the most fateful parties ever to take place in Europe. It is possible that the whole subsequent history of Italy, and certain that the remaining chapters in the story of the Borgias, would have turned out very differently if it had never been given. Or if Cesare, at least, had not been in Rome to attend.

  Background

  SUPERSTITIONS: ANOTHER SIDE OF THE RENAISSANCE

  SEARCHING FOR RATIONAL EXPLANATIONS OF WHY EVEN SOME of the most powerful figures in Renaissance Italy did the things they did when they did them can be a fool’s errand. With improbable frequency such people acted less on the basis of a cool analysis of whatever predicament they happened to be in, or a careful weighing of their options, or even what they were feeling, than in accordance with what their astrologers told them.

  This is part of a dark, or at least a singularly unimpressive, side of the world that produced the Borgias. Fact-based knowledge of the inner workings of the physical universe being as limited as it was in that world, superstition was rampant. People at all levels of society turned for understanding and guidance not only to astrology but to its sister disciplines of alchemy and necromancy and various schools of magic. If this is not often mentioned, the reason may be that it does not easily fit in with what we like to think about the Renaissance. We want to think of it as a period of glorious achievements in arts and letters, not as a time when it was generally taken for granted that someone as hardheaded as Cesare Borgia could rely on someone else’s interpretation of what the stars were saying to arrive at decisions on which his future and his very life might depend.

  Astrology’s roots were deep, reaching back to the beginnings of recorded history in Egypt, Babylon, Persia, China, and the Greco-Roman world. This is understandable; as people began to observe the patterns and movements of the heavens, it is hardly surprising that they should have searched for meaning in what they saw. Astrology was widely followed in the Roman Empire until Constantine the Great, having converted to Christianity, launched a persecution of its practitioners that would keep it underground for half a millennium. In conjunction with astronomy it flourished in the Arab world, however, and as contacts between Arabs and Christians became more common and intense, especially in Spain, astrology resurfaced and was soon again widespread.

  The greatest of the thirteenth century’s Holy Roman emperors, Frederick II, went nowhere without his astrologers. The Gian Galeazzo Visconti who in the fourteenth century became Milan’s first duke acknowledged that “I observe astrology in all my affairs,” his fifteenth-century successor Ludovico Sforza saw to the appointment of four professors of astrology at the University of Pavia, and an acquaintance of Duke Ercole d’Este complained that he “fills up his time with astrology and necromancy.” By Ercole’s time there was almost no such thing as an Italian court that did not employ astrologers; this was no less true of the Medici of Florence and the equally cultivated Montefeltri of Urbino than of the most brutish warlords. Alone or in conjunction with such other practices as geomancy (deciphering the patterns formed by a handful of thrown earth) and chiromancy (palm reading), astrology was used to foretell the future and decide what should be done, or when, or where. The secrets of the stars were applied in the practice of medicine and had an accepted place in the administration of justice.

  Not surprisingly, considering the challenge that the fatalistic determinism implicit in astrology posed for orthodox Christianity, astrology was opposed by the Church from its earliest days. In the fourteenth century the great humanist scholar Petrarch ridiculed it with icy contempt. A hundred years after him the
philosopher Pico della Mirandola attacked it with such devastating effect, pointing to its incompatibility with Christian notions of free will and divine providence, as to reduce its popularity noticeably. It persisted all the same. Though Pope Pius II was stern in his condemnation, Sixtus IV was a devoted believer, and so was his nephew Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. Much later, in the sixteenth century, there would be periods when ambassadors were not admitted to the papal court or that of the Holy Roman emperor until they had the approval of the official astronomers. One of Savonarola’s persistent criticisms of leading clerics of his day was their reliance on astrological readings. He never attacked Alexander VI on those grounds, however, and there is scant reason to think that Alexander, onetime protégé of the skeptical Pius II, took astrology at all seriously.

  Wherever astrology was popular, alchemy was usually popular as well. Easily ridiculed for the attempts of practitioners to discover the so-called philosopher’s stone and to use it to turn base metals into silver and gold, alchemy too had ancient roots and was not as childish as is generally believed. In its loftier forms it was a pursuit of purity and perfection: alchemists believed that if they could discover how to turn lead into the purest and most perfect of metals, gold, they would then be able to do something analogous with people, turning them not into gold but into superior beings, healthy, wise, and immensely long-lived.

  There was nothing that admirable about necromancy, the use of ritual and formula to make contact with the dead and enlist their help in putting curses on enemies, acquiring some desired possession, or learning such secrets as who committed a crime or where a lost object might be found. It was at least as old as astrology, but it had always been less respectable. Moses in his law code made it a capital offense, and millennia later Leonardo da Vinci scornfully observed that “of all human opinions that is to be reputed the most foolish which deals with the belief in necromancy.”

  Astrology appears to have been far more widely embraced in Italy than elsewhere in Europe. (The University of Paris condemned it in 1494, by which date it was being taught at universities across Italy.) Paradoxically, the difference may have stemmed from Italy’s unique status as the birthplace of the Renaissance and from the work of its scholars in rediscovering the literature of the distant past. Astrology’s credibility was enhanced by the many ancient texts on the subject that the Italian humanists were unearthing and translating. The cryptic character of such texts helped to make astrology seem both mysterious and a legitimate subject of study, worthy of close attention. It offered the same things it had offered thousands of years before: a way of drawing meaning from the night sky and making sense of a baffling world.

  Astrology’s failure to get such a firm grip on imaginations outside Italy did not mean that the Italians were more credulous than people elsewhere. For whatever reason, north of the Alps there was less interest in astrology than in magic, which involved the belief that one could achieve even the most ignoble of ends by entering into relations with spirits from other worlds, and which came in “black” and “white” varieties. Thus the appeal of witchcraft, and the fears of the orthodox that witches existed in great numbers and possessed secret spells and concoctions that could make people love or hate one another, visit terrible afflictions upon them, and work all manner of mischief. In 1484 an antiwitchcraft bull of Pope Innocent VIII sparked witch hunts on a terrifying scale—in a single year forty-one accused individuals were burned at the stake in the town of Como—with reverberations echoing down to Salem, Massachusetts, two-plus centuries later.

  It was all part of the environment in which the people of fifteenth-century Europe lived their lives, and it would remain a central part of that environment until the first real scientists appeared on the scene with their demands for bona fide evidence and their emphasis on repeatable experiments. In the interim, ironically, superstition contributed in important ways to the birth of science. The work of astrologers in studying the heavens did more than anything else to expand the knowledge of astronomy, just as alchemy turned out to be the parent of chemistry. Ultimately, inevitably, astrology and its sister superstitions were reduced to the marginal things they are today, sources of harmless amusement for many, of income for others, and of irrational obsessions for an unfortunate few.

  21

  Alone

  Cesare, when his luck appeared to have pretty much run out, would tell Machiavelli that at the great crisis of his life, when everything was at stake, he had been prepared for everything except what actually happened.

  That climactic crisis, which not only followed Cardinal Castelli’s garden party but was a direct consequence of it, was presaged by an event so odd that it has been remembered ever since in spite of being essentially meaningless. On the day after the party, an owl flew into the papal apartments through an open window, fell dead, and was declared by Alexander to be an “evil omen.”

  An omen of what? First came other harbingers, followed in short order by the thing itself. On August 7, the day after the episode of the owl, the Venetian ambassador paid a routine call on the pope and found him wrapped in a shawl in spite of the punishing heat and in uncharacteristically low spirits. He fretted not only about official business—especially the imponderable consequences of the new war for Naples—but also about such things as the growing number of lives being claimed by that year’s summer fevers. All this was unusual enough for the ambassador to make note of it in his report. He made no mention, however, of Cesare; presumably Valentino was not present, occupied with preparations for his return to the north.

  On August 11, the eleventh anniversary of Alexander’s election, Cardinal Castelli fell seriously ill. On Saturday the twelfth, exactly a week after the party, the pope rose as usual, said mass, breakfasted, vomited, and returned in distress to his bed. Cesare, on the verge of departing the city, was struck down by the same symptoms at almost exactly the same time. He managed to make his way to his quarters directly above Alexander’s apartment before collapsing. He appeared to be the more dangerously afflicted of the two. The pope lay in silence after ordering the Vatican barricaded, feeling well enough, after a few days, to sit up and watch some of the cardinals attending him play cards at his bedside. Cesare, by contrast, became so alarmingly feverish that he was stripped naked and lowered into a huge oil jar filled with cold water; his skin was reported to have peeled as a result. He was in a state of delirium when, on the seventeenth, Alexander took such a severe turn for the worse that his physicians were soon declaring him to be beyond hope. After receiving the last rites, he died a solitary death on the night of August 18. The servants attending him, terrified, stripped the pontifical apartments of everything of value (even the throne disappeared) and vanished into the dark streets. Long before sunrise the people of the city knew what had happened and were coming together in rowdy clusters, looking for Spaniards to attack and rob.

  Cesare’s patron, the man who had made everything possible, was gone. It was a blow, obviously, and it called for an immediate response. But Cesare had long anticipated that such a thing not only could happen but was certain to happen sooner or later. And he had long been prepared—not for the pope’s fall from hearty good health into his grave in less than two weeks in August 1503, specifically, but certainly for his removal at some unforeseeable point, and so for the day when he, Cesare, would be entirely on his own. Everything he had done since casting aside the red hat can be seen as preparation for that day: the hurry to carve a principality out of the Papal States; the destruction of the warlords of the Romagna and elsewhere; the building up of an army superior to any the other Italian princes could put in the field; the uprooting and scattering of the Roman barons; and the loading of the College of Cardinals with Borgia loyalists.

  The vigor and thoroughness with which Cesare pursued all these objectives was one of the things that Machiavelli found admirable about him. By achieving all of them, he had positioned himself to act swiftly whenever the pope did finally die or become incapacita
ted, and to deal decisively with whatever obstacles might rise up in his path. What undid all these preparations—what he didn’t foresee and could hardly have prepared for had he somehow foreseen it—was that when Alexander exited the stage, he himself, Cesare, would be in a state of total helplessness.

  His one great stroke of luck on the night of the pope’s death was the presence in the Vatican of the most ferociously loyal of his Spanish companions, Michelotto Corella, who had raced from his base at Perugia upon learning of Cesare’s illness. Without Michelotto, all might have been lost. Alexander had been dead only minutes when, accompanied by armed retainers, Michelotto burst into the papal apartments and demanded access to the locked inner chamber that had served as Alexander’s strongbox. When the cardinal responsible for the security of that chamber refused, Michelotto put a dagger to his throat and offered a simple choice: hand over the key or die. Chests that must have contained no less than a hundred thousand ducats, possibly much more, were then hauled upstairs to Cesare’s sickroom. Guards were posted under the alternating supervision of Michelotto and Jofrè Borgia, and all settled in to wait for Cesare to recover or die.

  He recovered, but at a maddeningly slow pace, and while he was doing so Rome descended into madness. The remnants of the old baronial clans came rushing back to reclaim the properties that the Borgias had taken from them, and to settle scores. Twelve hundred men led by Fabio Orsini, vengeful son of the strangled Paolo, fanned out through the streets on the other side of the Tiber from the Vatican, setting fire to the homes and places of business of the city’s Spaniards, assaulting any “Catalans” they could lay hands on and killing several. Fabio—whose wife was a Lanzol Borgia—declared that he would not be satisfied until he had washed his hands and face in Borgia blood. Outside the city it was much the same: displaced Orsini and Colonna and Savelli with murder in their hearts jostled with one another to take back what they had thought lost forever and bring ruin to their foes.