Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  IT IS SOMEHOW characteristic of Pope Sixtus that his death, on August 12, 1484, should have been generally attributed to frustration at having peace forced upon him by the princes of Italy. He certainly died unlamented; indeed, the news of his death caused two weeks of rioting in Rome, inspired by his greatest Roman enemies, the Colonna. Characteristic too is his superb free-standing bronze tomb by Pollaiuolo in the Vatican—probably the most magnificent of any pope, if we except that by Michelangelo which was planned by his nephew Giuliano (the future Julius II) for himself but never properly completed.

  It need hardly be said that Giuliano had his eye on the Papacy; so, too, did Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. Neither, however, despite offers of huge bribes and lucrative promotions, was able to raise the necessary degree of support in the Sacred College. And so, rivals as they were, they worked together to ensure that at the ensuing conclave the cardinals’ choice would fall on some second-rate puppet whom they could dominate. It can only be said that they succeeded. The Genoese Cardinal Giambattista Cibo, Pope Innocent VIII, was a hopeless nonentity. He too was much given to nepotism, with the difference that the beneficiaries were not his nephews but his own children by a Neapolitan mistress—one of whom, his hopelessly dissolute son Franceschetto, he was to marry off to the daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent in return for the grant of a red hat to Lorenzo’s thirteen-year-old son, Giovanni.6 When, three years later, Giovanni took his place in the College, his father wrote to him warning him of the evils of Rome, “that sink of all iniquity,” and urging him “to act so that you convince all who see you that the well-being and honor of the Church and the Holy See are more to you than anything else in the world.” Above all he must beware of the temptations to evildoing among the College of Cardinals, which is “at this moment poor in men of worth.… If the cardinals were such as they ought to be, the whole world would be better for it, for they would always elect a good pope and thus secure the peace of Christendom.”

  Sixtus had left the Papacy with enormous debts, and when it came to spending Innocent himself was no slouch; despite, therefore, the continued sale of indulgences, offices, and titles, his financial situation would certainly have become desperate but for a sudden windfall from a most unexpected source: the Ottoman Empire. On the death of an Ottoman sultan, the usual practice—to avoid any dispute over the succession—was for his eldest son instantly to have all his brothers garrotted, but when Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, died in 1481, his son and successor, Bayezit II, had unaccountably failed to dispatch his younger brother Cem,7 who also made a bid for the throne. He lost and fled for his life, taking refuge on Rhodes with the Knights of St. John whose grand master, Pierre d’Aubusson, had become famous all over Europe for his successful defense of the island against Cem’s father, Mehmet, in 1480. D’Aubusson welcomed him but secretly came to an agreement with the sultan to keep him under guard in return for an annual subsidy of 40,000 ducats. Soon, realizing that Rhodes was too close to Ottoman lands for comfort, d’Aubusson sent him on to one of the Knights’ commanderies in France. There Cem remained until 1489, when Pope Innocent took him over—he was, after all, an invaluable diplomatic and political asset—in return for red hats for d’Aubusson and a nominee of the French king. On his arrival in Rome he was given a splendid reception and escorted by Franceschetto to the Vatican, where he and his suite were lodged in magnificent apartments and lavishly entertained.

  The subsidy, however, continued to be payable, and the following year the pope received a Turkish embassy which presented him with 120,000 ducats—almost the total annual income of the Papal States—for the prince’s maintenance over the next three years. He also brought, as a present, the Holy Lance which had pierced Christ’s side at the time of the Crucifixion; a special chapel was built for it in St. Peter’s. Cem had by this time settled contentedly down with his court in the Vatican, where the appearance of groups of Muslims in their caftans and turbans must have caused even more raised eyebrows than the sight of the papal grandchildren playing in the gardens.

  By this time, however, the pope was sinking fast. To quote a recent authority:

  He slept almost continuously, waking to gorge himself on gargantuan meals.… He grew grossly fat and increasingly inert, being able, toward the end of his life, to take for nourishment no more than a few drops of milk from the breast of a young woman. When he seemed to be dying, an attempt to save his life was made by sacrificing the lives of three healthy young men to provide a blood transfusion. (Ironically, this attempt was made by a Jewish doctor.) The young men supplying the blood were paid one ducat each. They perished in the process and, with the onset of rigor mortis, the coins had to be prised from their clenched fists.8

  Innocent himself died on July 25, 1492, having lived just long enough to learn of the final expulsion of the Moors from Spain. His had been a deeply undistinguished pontificate. Under his governance Rome, which always needed a firm hand at the helm, had subsided into hopeless disorder, and the Papal States were not far off anarchy. On his deathbed he begged the assembled cardinals for their forgiveness for his shortcomings and enjoined them to choose a worthier successor.

  Alas, they did not do so.

  1. Frederick was the nephew of his namesake Frederick, Duke of Austria, the protector of the antipope John XXIII. (See chapter 16.)

  2. There were as yet no printed books. The invention of printing cannot be ascribed to a single year, but 1450 is as good a date as any.

  3. Giorgio Vasari tells us that the latter was destroyed when Paul III put in a new staircase. The only survivor of Nicholas’s work is his chapel. In the fresco depicting the ordination of St. Lawrence, the representation of the third-century Pope Sixtus II is said to be a portrait of Nicholas himself.

  4. Much of his verse was inspired by the poet Francesco Filelfo, who had been commissioned by Nicholas V to write a book of stories later described as “the most nauseous compositions that coarseness and filthy fancy ever spanned.” Nicholas, we are told, had much enjoyed them.

  5. There had been earlier Inquisitions, such as the so-called Papal Inquisition that ultimately eradicated the Cathars in the thirteenth century. The Spanish Inquisition was on an altogether different scale.

  6. Giovanni was not new to Church preferment. An abbot at the age of eight, he had been nominated to the great Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino at eleven. Later he was to become Pope Leo X.

  7. This is the modern Turkish spelling. The name is pronounced Gem.

  8. Noel, The Renaissance Popes, p. 62.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  The Monsters

  Few years in all history have proved to be more fateful than the year 1492. It began dramatically enough, with the completion on January 2 of the Spanish conquest of Granada, ending the Moorish kingdom and consolidating the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella; in March the Jews in Spain were given three months to accept Christianity or leave the country; April saw the death, in his family villa at Careggi, of Lorenzo the Magnificent; in late July Pope Innocent VIII died in Rome; and in early August Christopher Columbus sailed, all unwittingly, for the New World.

  Innocent’s successor, Rodrigo Borgia, now sixty-one years old, took the name Alexander VI. His great-uncle Calixtus had given him a good start: a cardinal at twenty-five, already in possession of a whole clutch of bishoprics and abbeys, at twenty-six he had become vice chancellor of the Holy See, an office which guaranteed him the vast income he was to hold over the next four pontificates. There can be little doubt that he owed his election principally to the huge bribes he shamelessly distributed: it is said that four muleloads of bullion were carried from the Borgia palace to that of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza. His principal rival, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, could not match his wealth and was obliged to contain his fury as best he could. His time would come.

  Alexander was, however, known to be highly intelligent and an experienced administrator, almost certainly better able than any of his rivals to restore order to Rome, which under I
nnocent had been allowed to fall dangerously out of control. He was said never to have missed a consistory—the cardinals’ regular meeting—except when he was ill or absent from Rome; no one had a deeper understanding of the workings of the Curia. He was also witty, charming, and excellent company: “Women,” wrote an envious contemporary, “were attracted to him like iron to a magnet.” What he lacked was the slightest glimmering of religious feeling. He made no secret of the fact that he was in the Church for what he could get out of it—and he got a very great deal. By the time of his election, which was celebrated with a bullfight in the piazza in front of St. Peter’s, he had fathered no fewer than eight children by at least three different women, earning him a severe rebuke from Pius II which had had no effect whatever. Those of his offspring who remained closest to him were his four children by the aristocratic Roman Vannozza Catanei: Giovanni, Cesare, Lucrezia, and Goffredo (or Gioffrè; in Catalan, Jofré.) No fewer than five of his family were to receive the red hat, Cesare at the age of only eighteen, by which time he was already an archbishop.

  Alexander had occupied the papal throne for only two years when King Charles VIII of France, described by the historian H. A. L. Fisher as “a young and licentious hunchback of doubtful sanity,” led an army of some 30,000 into Italy, inaugurating a whole series of invasions which over the next seventy years were to put much of the peninsula under foreign domination. The casus belli was Naples. The old Angevin royal line had died out in 1435 with Queen Joanna II, and the Neapolitan throne had been seized by the King of Sicily, Alfonso V of Aragon, who had been succeeded by his illegitimate son Ferdinand1 and then by Ferdinand’s son, another Alfonso. But the bastard grandson of a usurper, it was generally agreed, had but a tenuous claim to the throne; and Charles, as a descendant of his namesake Charles of Anjou, believed that he had a very much better one. All this was bad news indeed for Pope Alexander. In 1493 he had married his son Goffredo to Ferdinand’s granddaughter and on Ferdinand’s death had immediately recognized and crowned the young Alfonso. He was not encouraged by Charles’s repeated threats to depose him, nor by the news that his bitterest enemy, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, had declared for the French king and had headed north to join him.

  For Charles, the invasion began promisingly enough. With his cousin the Duke of Orleans, he crossed the Alps without incident, his heavy cannon having been shipped separately to Genoa. Milan, now under the brilliant Duke Ludovico Sforza (“il Moro”), received him with enthusiasm, as did Lucca and Pisa. In Florence, welcomed as a liberator by the Dominican firebrand Girolamo Savonarola, the king took the opportunity to expel Piero de’ Medici, who displayed none of the statesmanship of his father, Lorenzo, dead two years before. On December 31, 1494, Rome opened her gates and Charles installed himself in what is now Palazzo Venezia, while Alexander, who had unsuccessfully appealed to the Sultan Bayezit for assistance, briefly took refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo; but a fortnight later king and pope met for the first time—and Alexander’s famous charm did the rest. On January 17 he said Mass before 20,000 soldiers of the French army in the great piazza in front of St. Peter’s, with Charles himself acting as server.

  The French remained for another ten days in Rome. Already, like all armies of occupation, they were becoming increasingly unpopular. They showed little respect for the local people; every day brought new stories of violence, robbery, and rape. Even the palace of Vannozza Catanei was ransacked. It was with unconcealed joy and relief that on January 27 the Romans watched them march away to Naples, accompanied by Cesare Borgia—ostensibly as papal legate but in fact as a hostage for his father’s good behavior. With them too went Prince Cem, the only man in the whole immense company whom they were sorry to see depart.

  On February 22, 1495, Charles entered Naples. King Alfonso immediately abdicated and entered a monastery; his son Ferdinand II, also known as Ferrandino, fled for his life. The Neapolitans, on the other hand, who had never looked on the House of Aragon as anything other than usurping foreigners, gave the French king a hero’s welcome. On May 12 he was crowned for the second time. But, as he was all too soon to discover, there is all the difference in the world between a lightning offensive and a sustained program of occupation. The Neapolitans, delighted as they had been to get rid of the Aragonese, soon discovered that one foreign oppressor was very much like another. Unrest also grew among the inhabitants of many of the smaller towns, who found themselves having to support, for no good reason that they could understand, discontented and frequently licentious French garrisons.

  Beyond the Kingdom of Naples, too, men were beginning to feel alarm. Even those states, Italian and foreign, which had previously looked benignly upon Charles’s advance were asking themselves just how much further the young conqueror might be intending to go. Ferdinand and Isabella, who wanted Naples for themselves, made an alliance with the Emperor Maximilian I, cementing it by offering the hand of their daughter Joanna—later to be known, with good reason, as “the Mad”—to Maximilian’s son Philip and preparing an invasion fleet; and even the king’s former ally Ludovico il Moro of Milan, by now as alarmed as anyone, was further disconcerted by the presence at nearby Asti of the Duke of Orleans, whose claims to Milan through his grandmother the Duchess Valentina Visconti he knew to be no less strong than his own or than those of Charles to Naples. Pope Alexander, who had by this time recovered his sangfroid, found plenty of support for his anti-French alliance, the so-called Holy League, ostensibly pacific but in fact with a single objective: to send the new king packing.

  When news of the League was brought to Charles in Naples, he flew into a fury, but he did not underestimate the danger with which he was now faced. To make matters worse, he had lost both his distinguished hostages. Cesare had simply slipped away; Cem had contracted a high fever at Capua and died a few days later. Thus it was that only a week after his Neapolitan coronation Charles left his new kingdom forever and headed, together with 20,000 mules loaded with loot from Naples, back to the North. Rome was panic-stricken at the thought of his return. Alexander and most of his Curia slipped away to Orvieto, leaving only one unfortunate cardinal to greet the king.

  Fortunately, on this occasion the French army proved surprisingly well behaved, probably because Charles was reluctant to waste any more time before getting safely across the Alps. He would have liked an audience with the pope, to discuss the possible dissolution of the Holy League and obtain full papal recognition of his Neapolitan coronation, but in the face of Alexander’s determination to avoid him, there was nothing he could do. The march, which involved dragging his heavy artillery across the Apennines in midsummer, proved a nightmare, and on July 5, 1495, he reached the little town of Fornovo near Parma to find himself facing some 30,000 soldiers of the League under the command of Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. The only battle of the whole campaign, fought on the following day, was over in a flash; but it was the bloodiest that Italy had seen for two hundred years. Gone were the days of the old mercenary condottieri, whose object was always to prolong a war as far as possible and live to fight again; they often tended to see a battle as little more than a stately pavane, with fighting—such as it was—hand to hand and artillery fire too weak and inaccurate to do much serious harm. The French had introduced a warfare of a very different kind: they, together with their Swiss and German mercenaries, fought to kill—and the heavy iron balls that burst from the mouths of their cannon inflicted hideous wounds.

  Gonzaga managed to present the Battle of Fornovo as a victory; few dispassionate observers would have agreed with him. The French admittedly forfeited their baggage train, which included Charles’s sword, helmet, gold seal, and a “black book” containing portraits of his female conquests, but their losses were negligible compared with those of the Italians, who had utterly failed to stop them. They continued their march that same night and reached Asti unmolested a few days later. There, however, bad news awaited them. Alfonso’s son Ferdinand II had landed in Calabria, where, supported
by Spanish troops from Sicily, he was rapidly advancing on Naples. On July 7 he reoccupied the city. Suddenly, all the French successes of the past year evaporated. A week or two later Charles led his army back across the Alps, leaving the Duke of Orleans behind to maintain a French presence as best he could.

  But the soldiers whom he disbanded at Lyons that November carried something deadlier far than any dream of conquest. Columbus’s three ships, returning to Spain from the Caribbean in 1493, had brought with them the first cases of syphilis known to the Old World; through the agency of the Spanish mercenaries sent by Ferdinand and Isabella to support King Alfonso, the disease had quickly spread to Naples, where it was rife by the time Charles arrived. After three months of dolce far niente, his men must in turn have been thoroughly infected, and it was almost certainly they who were responsible for introducing the disease north of the Alps.

  WITH CHARLES SAFELY out of the way, Alexander was free to settle down to his principal task, the aggrandizement of his family. His eldest son, Giovanni, already Duke of Gandia, he had destined for the throne of Naples; this ambition, however, came to nothing when, in June 1497, the young man disappeared. Two days later his body was recovered from the Tiber. His throat had been cut, and there were no fewer than nine stab wounds. Who was the murderer? Giovanni was only twenty, but his violent, unstable character and his penchant for other men’s wives had already made him countless enemies.

  Of all the possibilities, the likeliest seems to have been his brother Cesare; there were ugly rumors that the two had been rivals for the love of their sister-in-law, Goffredo’s wife, Sancia, or even of their own sister, Lucrezia. Cesare was well capable of fratricide—three years later he almost certainly murdered his brother-in-law Alfonso of Aragon, second husband of Lucrezia—and his jealousy of his elder brother was well known. There is also the curious fact that although Pope Alexander was genuinely shattered by the assassination of his favorite son—he is said to have touched neither food nor water for three days—he seems to have been content that no one was ever formally accused, much less convicted, of the crime. Cesare too, had he been innocent, would surely have moved Heaven and Earth to find his brother’s murderer.