The Borgias

by G. J. Meyer

  On August 20, Cesare was put aboard a galley that joined a flotilla commanded by the same Prospero Colonna whom he had tricked in departing Rome after Alexander’s death. They were bound for Spain, and upon arrival Cesare was confined in a remote castle at Chinchilla in the mountainous backcountry of his native Valencia. Though in no way mistreated—he was allowed a cadre of personal servants and even a mistress—he is not likely to have had much opportunity to keep abreast of what was happening far away. To the great questions of the hour he had become irrelevant, and his chances of being set free were reduced to zero by Isabella of Spain’s hostility—she wanted him tried for the murders of the dukes of Gandía and Bisceglie—and by Pope Julius II’s refusal to have him back in Italy. Lucrezia and his brother-in-law Juan king of Navarre sent appeals for clemency but achieved nothing. It was entirely possible that Cesare, like Ludovico Sforza of Milan and the heir to the last Aragonese king of Naples, would spend the rest of his days a prisoner.

  Though he evidently still had substantial funds in banks in northern Italy, any effort to retrieve them would have attracted the attention of the agents of the pope, who was himself in financial straits and bent on seizing Cesare’s assets wherever he could find them. In the spring of 1505, acting on Cesare’s behalf, Juan of Navarre appealed to Louis XII for payment of the dowry that the new Duke Valentino had been promised at the time of his betrothal to Charlotte d’Albret. He was curtly refused. Frustration at this rebuff may help to explain a bizarre event that shortly followed. One day during a conversation atop the ramparts at Chinchilla, Cesare suddenly hurled himself upon the castle’s governor, apparently intending to throw him to his death. Instead Cesare was overpowered and injured in the course of being subdued. Not long thereafter he was moved to the great fortress of La Mota at Medina del Campo northwest of Madrid. This was one of the favorite residences of Ferdinand and Isabella, high-walled, stoutly built, and always heavily guarded. There he was confined under far more austere circumstances than at Chinchilla.

  This move is likely to have been partly the result of the death, late in the previous year, of Queen Isabella. Her passing had left Cesare’s fate in the hands—or so it seemed, for the time being—of her husband Ferdinand. This opened a whole range of new possibilities: the Spanish king was far too cynical and self-serving to attach any importance to his wife’s righteous view of Cesare as a moral lost cause, too monstrous ever to be set free. For Ferdinand, by contrast, the only question was whether Cesare might in some way be made useful. Being himself without scruples—a decade hence he would be gulling his young son-in-law Henry VIII of England, drawing him into an unnecessary war with France and then deserting him as soon as his own aims had been accomplished—Ferdinand was incapable of trusting anyone. In 1505 his suspicions were focused on his viceroy in Naples, Gonsalvo the Great Captain. Gonsalvo was as loyal an agent as any king had ever had, and his achievements first in Granada and then in Italy should have made Ferdinand grateful for his existence. The opposite was true, however; the death of Isabella removed the only restraint on Ferdinand’s dark imaginings, and in short order he became convinced that Gonsalvo was scheming to seize Naples for himself. He began to consider not only releasing Cesare but sending him to Naples at the head of an army, and the transfer from Chinchilla to Medina del Campo may have been a first step in that direction. Cesare’s assignment would be to replace Gonsalvo—or to subdue him if he declined to stand aside.

  Cesare, if he learned of this possibility, must have been ecstatic; such an assignment would at a stroke have returned him to prominence in Italy. But it was not to be; the complications were too numerous and too imposing. Ferdinand wanted the friendship of Pope Julius and knew that gaining it would be impossible if he injected Cesare back into Italian affairs. Also, Ferdinand was at this time looking for ways to improve his relations with France. His gestures in that direction would have no chance of success if he freed the onetime protégé whom Louis XII now despised as a traitor.

  And it soon developed that Cesare was not Ferdinand’s to do with as he wished after all. He belonged, instead, to Ferdinand’s son-in-law Philip of Hapsburg, Philip the Handsome so called, with whom the king had a poisonously bad relationship. Philip was the husband of Ferdinand’s eldest surviving daughter, Juana, who as a result of her mother Isabella’s death was now queen of Castile, and the couple had two small sons. It was a bitter fact, for Ferdinand, that his and Isabella’s son Juan had died at nineteen, leaving a pregnant bride whose child was later stillborn, and that the daughter who now wore the crown of Castile and was heir to that of Aragon was producing healthy male offspring for the German House of Hapsburg. It meant that everything Ferdinand and Isabella had built together in three decades of scheming and danger and hard toil would pass after his death from their ancient House of Trastámara to a tribe of grasping Germans.

  Philip deepened Ferdinand’s chagrin by demanding to be recognized as king of Castile, not just its new queen’s consort. Thus it proved to matter a great deal that Medina del Campo and its castle were in Castile rather than Aragon, so that Cesare was no longer in Ferdinand’s custody but in that of Juana and Philip, neither of whom had any wish to put him at the old king’s disposal. Less than a year after Isabella’s death, Ferdinand would attempt to foil Philip by marrying a seventeen-year-old French princess for the purpose of providing himself with a new male heir; any such son would have been first in Aragon’s line of succession, ahead of Juana and her brood. And after three years of trying, presumably with the help of the virility potions concocted by his physicians, Ferdinand would succeed in getting his queen with child. In May 1509 she gave birth to the hoped-for son, but the child lived only hours. That was still in the future, however, when in September 1506 Philip suddenly died at Burgos, probably of typhoid. His death left Cesare at the mercy of Queen Juana, who had been taught by her late mother to regard him as the devil incarnate and was beginning to behave in the ways that would cause her to be remembered as Juana the Mad. The first thing that raised questions about her sanity was her refusal to have her husband buried and her insistence on taking his corpse with her wherever she traveled. Possibly with the encouragement of Cesare’s sister-in-law the dowager duchess of Gandía, widow of the Juan Borgia who had been murdered in Rome in 1497, she carried out her late mother’s wish by having Cesare indicted for the murders of his brother and his brother-in-law the duke of Bisceglie. A trial would presumably follow.

  All was not lost, however. With Philip the Handsome and Queen Isabella both dead, Juana losing her wits, and Ferdinand setting out to confront Gonsalvo in Naples personally, discipline at La Mota began to go slack. Cesare’s keepers evidently saw him as a man who still had a future, who might eventually be powerful once again and was therefore worth cultivating. Certainly they were open to suasion and bribery. With the help of the governor at La Mota, one Cárdenas, Cesare was able to secure a length of strong rope and make arrangements for an escape.

  On the night of October 25, with a small party of mounted confederates waiting below, he climbed out the window of his chamber high in La Mota’s walls and began lowering himself down the rope. A watchman saw what was happening and sounded the alarm, a guard entered the chamber and cut the rope, and Cesare was injured as he fell to the ground. He was put on a horse all the same and taken to a remote property belonging to Governor Cárdenas. He remained there a month, a hunted fugitive, and when able to travel was moved in secret to the port of Castres and put aboard a ship bound for Navarre. Evidently he remained a semi-invalid at this point: someone whose path he crossed described him as “a man doubled up, with an ugly face, a big nose, dark.” When storms forced his ship into a fishing port, Cesare was obliged to continue on muleback. Finally, however, he made his way to Navarre’s capital of Pamplona, a city he had never seen in spite of having had its bishopric conferred upon him as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy. He was described as descending on the little city “like the devil.” Presumably this was a reference to his appea
rance after weeks on the run and much hardship.

  Once settled in Pamplona, he wasted no time before setting out to recover at least some of his old importance. He dispatched envoys to Italy, sending with them letters to various individuals whom he thought might be inclined to help—for example Francesco Gonzaga, marquess of Mantua, who was deeply infatuated with his sister-in-law Lucrezia Borgia d’Este, now duchess of Ferrara following the death of her husband’s father. In these letters Cesare signed himself duke of Romagna, signaling that the Romagna was where he hoped to reestablish himself. The lack of response showed that he could expect no assistance in that regard. Gonzaga at this time was employed as captain-general of the forces with which Pope Julius II—following Cesare’s example—had recently driven the Baglioni out of Perugia and the Bentivoglii out of Bologna. That he would break with an imperious and increasingly powerful pope for the sake of the penniless Cesare in his distant refuge was inconceivable even if his young son and heir was, supposedly, still betrothed to Cesare’s daughter Louisa.

  As for Pope Julius himself, sensitive to Cesare’s popularity in the Romagna and mindful of the difficulties that his return could stir up, he saw no reason to be friendly or even neutral. When a representative sent by Cesare called on him at Bologna, of which he was taking personal possession after the expulsion of the Bentivoglii, Julius had the unfortunate man thrown into prison. Lucrezia appears to have been alone in daring to request his release, and as before her appeals were politely denied.

  At about this same time Louis XII refused a request for restoration of the revenues to which Cesare had once been entitled as duke of Valentinois. Cesare therefore was left without prospects in Italy, France, or Spain—without any friends at all among the crowned heads of Europe, aside from his brother-in-law Juan of Navarre. Juan, being not only short of funds but faced with a rebellion in which Ferdinand of Spain, Louis of France, and Maximilian of Hapsburg were all meddling, could offer Cesare one thing only: command of the Navarrese army. Now recovered from his injuries—he was described at about this time as “a big man, strong, handsome, and in the full flight of his manhood”—he was soon directing the siege of a rebel fortress at Viana.

  Awakened early on the morning of March 12, 1507, when a relief force of rebels attempted to break the siege, he donned his armor, mounted his charger, and led a party of his soldiers in hot pursuit of fleeing enemy horsemen. He chased them into a ravine, where he was ambushed and cut to pieces at the conclusion of a bitter fight in which he killed several men. His body was stripped naked and abandoned. Perhaps he had not realized that he was alone as he entered the ravine—that his own men were either not following or had been outrun. It is not impossible that he committed a kind of suicide, intentionally throwing himself into a situation that made a swift death inevitable, preferring early oblivion to long years as the aging dependent of a poor and insignificant king.

  The body when recovered was placed in the church of Saint Mary of the Assumption in Viana. Over it was constructed the ornate tomb that an indignant bishop of Calahorra would later order destroyed.

  Aftermath

  The end of Cesare left Lucrezia exposed and solitary. Though now duchess of Ferrara, her father-in-law having died in 1505, she was in a cold union with a dour duke who would never have married her if he had not been bullied into it and showed no interest in her except as a body upon which to generate an heir. Married five years now, repeatedly pregnant, Lucrezia had yet to give Alfonso a living child. For this reason and others she remained an isolated figure at the Ferrara court, an outsider.

  Anyone wishing to persuade Alfonso that association with the Borgias could lead only to grief needed only to point to what his family had already suffered as a consequence of his marriage. Lucrezia, in moving to Ferrara, had brought along as part of her entourage a young cousin named Angela. A great beauty (painted later in life by Leonardo da Vinci), this Angela was like Lucrezia herself a Lanzol, but like all the Roman Lanzols she used Borgia as her surname. Soon after arriving in Ferrara, she found herself pursued both by Alfonso d’Este’s priapic brother Cardinal Ippolito and their illegitimate half-brother Giulio. This led to the cardinal’s sending thugs to waylay Giulio and (because Angela had driven Ippolito half-mad with jealousy by rhapsodizing upon the beauty of his rival’s eyes) blind him. Giulio escaped with his fine face disfigured but only one eye lost. Outraged to learn that the cardinal’s only punishment was to be ordered to leave Ferrara, he began to plot revenge. Soon he was at the center of a conspiracy not only to poison the cardinal but to murder Alfonso as well and replace him as duke with the youngest of the legitimate Este brothers, Ferrante, named for his maternal grandfather King Ferrante of Naples. The scheme was discovered, the conspirators were convicted of treason, and all were beheaded except Giulio and Ferrante, who were literally at the chopping block when reprieved and sent off to confinement.

  Ferrante would die in his dungeon in Ferrara’s great palace thirty-four years later. Giulio would be released after fifty-four years, a piece of human wreckage in his ninth decade and an object of mirth as he stumbled into the daylight in his tattered, antique clothes. Angela Borgia, untouched by the tragedy she had innocently set in motion, became the bride of an Italian count six months after the brothers’ arrest. She later gave birth to a son who would grow up to marry Cardinal Ippolito’s illegitimate daughter.

  Louis of France encouraged Alfonso to rid himself of his Borgia wife. Such a move would certainly have been approved, and probably abetted, by Julius II, whose hatred of all the Borgias remained so intense that he refused to set foot in the Vatican apartments that had been their private quarters. The duke, however, politely ignored the suggestion. Shedding a wife of several years could be a messy affair. An annulment would be required, and establishing grounds could lead to the kind of unpleasantness that the end of Lucrezia’s first marriage had brought down on Giovanni Sforza. What probably mattered more, the financial consequences would have been painful. Lucrezia, if sent packing, would be entitled to take her dowry with her. With northern Italy in turmoil and the relationship between Spain and France unsettled at best, Ferrara was likely soon to be once again at war. Alfonso could ill afford to give up the hundred thousand ducats and other treasure that had come to him with his bride.

  Alfonso appears to have been content with his life and eventually with his wife as well. He was a blunt character of simple tastes, dividing much of his time between the workshop and foundry where he tinkered with the production of guns, and his retinue of prostitutes. Her failure to produce children aside, Lucrezia had done nothing with which any sane husband could have found fault. In almost all ways she was an exemplary consort: not only strikingly beautiful and so graceful that witnesses wrote of her seeming to walk on air, but unfailingly sweet-natured, brimming with “laughing good humor and gaiety.” She was fluent in Valencian Spanish, Italian, and French, had considerable knowledge of Latin and some of Greek, and was a sophisticated patron of the arts. Finally she was modest in conduct, devout in religion, and, thanks both to her own abilities and to the responsibilities that Alexander VI had given her at an early age, a capable and conscientious administrator. Writers unable to square Lucrezia’s terrible reputation with her admirable behavior after the move to Ferrara have sometimes claimed that she underwent an astonishing transformation upon marrying Alfonso d’Este, the murdering libertine somehow turning into a grande dame of the highest quality. But as the Borgia biographer Michael Mallett observed almost half a century ago, this notion is “implausible and unhistorical.” There was no transformation because the vicious young Lucrezia of legend never existed.

  In 1508 she gave birth to a healthy son, named Ercole in honor of his late grandfather. In 1509 she had a second healthy son, this one named Ippolito after his uncle the cardinal and himself a future cardinal. As the mother of an heir and a spare she was at last relatively secure. By this time a new stage in the so-called Italian Wars had broken out as expected, the focus on norther
n Italy rather than Naples, and Ferrara was unavoidably involved. This fresh round of fighting, which would go on for eight years, was the work of Pope Julius. First he allied himself with France and Spain to drive Venice out of its recently conquered mainland territories, then later switched sides and joined Venice in making war on France. Alfonso d’Este and the duchy of Ferrara became prime targets of the pope’s inexhaustible reserves of wrath; Julius excommunicated the duke, placed Ferrara under an interdict, and declared that the House of Este’s right to rule had become null and void. The Este would be saved by Alfonso’s skill as a soldier and his mastery of the art and science of artillery, by the fact that when off at the war he was able to leave Ferrara under the regency of his capable wife, and finally, in 1513, by a stroke of immense good fortune. In that year Pope Julius, in the midst of preparations for an invasion of Ferrara, suddenly died. The invasion was called off, and the danger to Ferrara passed. The war years had tightened the bond between Lucrezia and the duke, giving each new respect for and trust in the other.

  Lucrezia was in her mid-thirties when peace returned, and had barely a handful of years to live. Those years would be as eventful as the ones that had come before. In 1512 her son by the duke of Bisceglie, Rodrigo of Aragon, died at age twelve. She had not seen him since being obliged to leave him behind when she departed Rome for Ferrara but had always been devoted to his well-being, and she was deeply wounded by the loss. After another series of failed pregnancies she gave birth to a son named Alessandro in 1514, a daughter named Leonora in 1515, and a boy named Francesco in 1516, the year when little Alessandro died. In the meantime, and originally at Cesare’s request, she had assumed responsibility for some of the young Borgias who without her might have been cut adrift, among them the Infant of Rome (endlessly rumored to be her child) and the mysterious Rodrigo Borgia who had been born at about the time of Pope Alexander’s death. The diligence with which she enlisted her husband’s help in trying to find a place for these children, and Alfonso’s efforts to get the unpleasant young Infant an appointment at France’s royal court, make it highly improbable that the duke could have thought it even possible that any of them might be her children.