Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  For a time, it seemed that Alexander was a reformed character. Indeed, he said as much. “The blow that has fallen upon us,” he declared,

  is the heaviest that we could possibly have sustained. We loved the Duke of Gandia more than anyone else in the world. We would have given seven tiaras to be able to recall him to life. God has done this as a punishment for our sins. We for our part are resolved to mend our own life and to reform the Church.

  It certainly needed reforming. The cost of the wars required to maintain the Papal States and the ambitious building programs of successive popes meant that there was a constant search for new sources of income. The discovery in 1462 of an alum mine near Tolfa came to the papal treasury as a godsend. Alum was indispensable to both the cloth and leather trades. Heretofore it had had to be imported at considerable expense from Asia Minor; henceforth the popes could declare a ban on supplies from the Muslim world and establish their own monopoly. But alum alone was nowhere near enough. Indulgences were another invaluable source of income, as was the sale of offices. More and more sinecures were invented; these were bought for large sums and guaranteed an income for life. The result was a vast increase in the membership of the Curia, many of whose members had absolutely nothing to do.

  As part of his proposed new reforms, Alexander now nominated a commission of six of the most pious cardinals, and less than two months later a draft Bull of Reformation had been prepared. The pope was banned from selling benefices and from transferring Church property to laypersons. As for the cardinals, who were to be drawn from all the nations, none should possess more than one bishopric; their households were limited to eighty people and thirty horses; they were banned from hunting, theaters, carnivals, and tournaments; and their funeral expenses were not to exceed 1,500 ducats. The lesser clergy were similarly reined in: they must refuse all bribes and put away their concubines.

  Who, however, was expected to enforce these new rules? Only those who stood to lose by them. And so the draft bull remained precisely that, and Pope Alexander soon slipped back into his old ways. Cesare, who had never renounced his, gradually replaced Giovanni in his father’s affections and in 1498 persuaded Alexander to release him from the cardinalate and his religious vows and allow him to return to the outside world. As a layman once again—he was the first man in history to lay down the red hat—he soon became the pope’s éminence grise. It was largely thanks to his influence that by the end of that same year Alexander had abandoned his anti-French policies and had willingly given his consent to the annulment of the marriage of the new French king, Louis XII, assuring him at the same time that he would not oppose Louis’s claims to Milan and Naples. In doing so, he opened the way to new French adventures in Italy, but such considerations were of minimal interest to Cesare, who traveled in magnificent state as papal envoy to France, where he was made Duke of Valentinois and given as a bride Charlotte d’Albret, sister of the King of Navarre. On his return to Italy he directed his energies to the Papal States, eliminating one by one—by expulsion or poisoning—the feudal lords of Umbria and Lazio, Romagna, and the Marches until the whole area had become a personal fief of the Borgia family.

  The year 1498 also saw the solution of a problem that had plagued Pope Alexander since the beginning of his pontificate. It was personified by the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola. Originally from Ferrara, since 1490 Savonarola had lived in Florence, preaching fierce and fiery sermons, delivering apocalyptic prophecies, and claiming direct communication with God. The chief objects of his wrath were the Medici, the Duke of Milan, and—particularly after Alexander’s accession—the Papacy; and he did not mince his words:

  Popes and prelates speak against worldly pride and ambition and are plunged in it up to their ears. They preach chastity and keep mistresses .… They think only of the world and worldly things; for souls they care nothing.… They have made of the Church a house of ill fame … a prostitute who sits upon the throne of Solomon and signals to the passers-by.… O prostituted Church, you have unveiled your abuse before the eyes of the whole world, and your poisoned breath rises to the heavens.

  The overthrow of the Medici and their expulsion from Florence in 1494 was, as we know, the simple result of the French invasion; but to the Florentines it was Savonarola’s doing, and he emerged as the new leader of the city, setting up a “Christian and religious republic” and ordering regular “bonfires of the vanities”: of mirrors, cosmetics, fine clothes, secular books and pictures (including paintings by Michelangelo and Botticelli), musical instruments, gaming tables, even chessmen. While it lasted, the general atmosphere must have been more like that of Puritan England in the seventeenth century than that of Renaissance Florence in the fifteenth.

  Already by 1497 the pope had had enough. He excommunicated the turbulent friar and, when Savonarola took no notice, called for his arrest and execution. By that time the Florentines were sick of him too. On April 8, 1498, a mob attacked the Convent of San Marco, of which he was prior; in the ensuing struggle several of his supporters were killed, and, along with his two closest associates, he finally surrendered. All three were tortured to exact their confessions; and on May 23 they were led out into the Piazza della Signoria, where they were stripped of their friar’s robes and hanged in chains from a single cross. A huge fire was lit beneath them, so that Savonarola should burn just as the vanities had burned before him. The ashes of all three were then flung into the Arno River, to ensure that no relics would be rescued for future veneration.

  Outside Italy, Pope Alexander’s most fateful decision was taken in 1493, when he made the all-important adjudication between Spain and Portugal over their recent territorial discoveries in Africa and America. For most of the century the Portuguese, inspired and encouraged by their infante, Dom Henrique—better known as Prince Henry the Navigator—had been steadily exploring the west coast of Africa; and during the last decade Vasco da Gama and Bartolomeu Dias had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and opened up the Cape route to the Indies. In these achievements the Spanish monarchs had shown markedly little interest; their time came only when Columbus returned from his first voyage in 1493 and announced that he had planted the flag of Castile in the New World. At their request, therefore, Pope Alexander drew a line of demarcation from north to south one hundred leagues west of the Azores, decreeing that all zones of exploration to the east of that line should be allotted to Portugal, all those to the west to Spain. In 1494, after protests by the Portuguese, the line was moved further westward by the Treaty of Tordesillas; this made it possible in 1500 for Portugal to claim Brazil and explains why Brazil remains Portuguese-speaking today.

  THE LAST FOUR years of Alexander’s pontificate were taken up largely with his and Cesare’s ambition to appropriate the Papal States and to turn them into a Borgia family fief. The program was mapped out and put into execution by Cesare, who by now utterly dominated his father. It involved the crushing of many of the great Roman families, above all the Orsini; it necessitated several assassinations, which were normally followed by seizures of property; and it was further financed by the open sale of the highest offices of the Church, including that of cardinal. Cesare Borgia was hated and feared for his violence and cruelty. “Every night,” the Venetian ambassador reported to his government, “four or five men are discovered assassinated, bishops, prelates and others, so that all Rome trembles for fear of being murdered by the duke.”

  Yet, although he was hideously disfigured by syphilis—toward the end of his life he never showed himself in public without a mask—few who came in contact with Cesare failed to be impressed. His energy was boundless, his courage absolute. He appeared to need no sleep, and his speed of movement was astonishing: he was said to arrive at one city before he had left the last. At the same time he shared to the full his father’s love of women. In his short life—he was to die in battle in Navarre, at the age of thirty-one—he left at least eleven bastards; and the diary of the papal master of ceremonies, Johannes Burchard, leaves
us in no doubt of how he spent his leisure:

  On Sunday evening, October 30 [1501]. Don Cesare Borgia gave a supper in his apartments in the apostolic palace, with fifty decent prostitutes or courtesans in attendance, who, after the meal, danced with the servants and others there, first fully dressed and then naked. Following the supper, too, lampstands holding lighted candles were placed on the floor and chestnuts strewn about, which the prostitutes, naked and on their hands and knees, had to pick up as they crawled in and out among the lampstands. The Pope, Don Cesare, and Donna Lucrezia were all present to watch. Finally prizes were offered—silken doublets, pairs of shoes, hats, and other garments—for those men who could perform the act most frequently with the prostitutes.

  At this point it might be useful to say a word about Donna Lucrezia. She has been cast as the femme fatale of the Borgia dynasty; but to what extent she deserved the role remains uncertain. She was certainly not just a pretty face; on two occasions her father handed over to her the complete control of the Vatican Palace, with authority to deal with his correspondence. As for her reputation, there is absolutely no evidence for the rumors of incest with one or more of her brothers—or indeed with her father—apart from that given by her first husband, Giovanni Sforza, during the divorce proceedings, during which several other baseless accusations were leveled in both directions. She seems to have been very largely the hapless instrument of her father’s and brother’s political ambitions. Her marriage to Sforza in 1493 at the age of thirteen—after two earlier betrothals—was due to Alexander’s eagerness to establish an alliance with Milan; before long, however, the Sforza were no longer necessary and the pope’s son-in-law became an inconvenience. In 1497 there seems to have been a plot to assassinate him—though which of the three Borgias was implicated we shall never know—but he escaped from Rome just in time, and it was then decided that a divorce would be sufficient. Giovanni, who stood to lose not only his wife but also her dowry and the city of Pesaro, which he held in fief from the pope, fought hard but was eventually forced to agree on the humiliating grounds of impotence, despite his testimony that the marriage had been consummated more than a thousand times. There was the additional embarrassment that at the time of the divorce Lucrezia was actually pregnant; but the paternity of the child, Giovanni, who was born in secret, has never been established.

  Lucrezia’s next marriage was even more ill starred; her second husband, Alfonso of Aragon, whom she genuinely loved, was murdered by Cesare—quite possibly out of jealousy, though there were also political overtones. She was, we are told, broken-hearted, but her father soon had a third marriage lined up—to another Alfonso, the Este duke of Ferrara. The attendant festivities, on the usual sumptuous scale, were paid for by the sale of eighty new offices in the Curia and the appointment of nine new cardinals—five of them Spaniards—at 130,000 ducats per red hat. (At about the same time the pope also appropriated the entire fortune of the Venetian Cardinal Giovanni Michiel, who had recently died in agony, almost certainly poisoned by Cesare.) This marriage was also ostensibly successful, in that Lucrezia bore her husband a number of children, but it did not prevent her from having passionate affairs with the poet Pietro Bembo and her bisexual brother-in-law, Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. Despite these profligacies, she achieved comparative respectability and outlived the rest of her family, dying in Ferrara in 1519 after giving birth to her eighth child.

  THE MONTH OF August 1503 saw Rome at its hottest and most unhealthy. The nearby Pontine marshes had not yet been drained; malaria was rife, and several cases of plague had also been reported. It was the time of year when all those who could afford to do so left the city, but these were critical times—a French army was on the march to Naples—and the pope had remained in the Vatican. On the twelfth, both Alexander and Cesare were stricken with fever. Cesare recovered, but the seventy-two-year-old pope could not fight the infection, and six days later he was dead.

  The fact that father and son had collapsed on the same day inevitably aroused suspicions of foul play. It was pointed out that on the third the two of them had dined with the recently appointed Cardinal Adriano Castellesi in his nearby villa; the rumor rapidly spread around Rome that they had intended to poison their host but had inadvertently drunk the poisoned wine themselves. For some reason this mildly ridiculous story has survived and found its way into a number of serious histories; it ignores the fact that although by this time the Borgia father and son had a good many murders to their credit, they had no ascertainable motive to kill Castellesi. Nor are there any known poisons which take over a week to have their effect. The likelihood is that Alexander and Cesare were simple victims of the epidemic and that the pope—improbable as it may have seemed—died a perfectly natural death.

  Thanks to the two of them, and in lesser measure to Lucrezia, the Borgias have become a legend for villainy and cruelty. Much of this was clearly justified; but all legends contain an element of exaggeration and often tend to obscure the truth. Moreover, because the Borgia legend concentrates on their crimes, the credit side tends to be forgotten. At the time of his election, Alexander had been vice chancellor to five successive popes; he understood the ways of the Vatican as well as anyone alive. For the past fifty years, it had done its best to build up the reputation of the Holy See as one of the European superpowers, able to negotiate with France and Spain as a political equal. Unfortunately, as Alexander well knew, it was nothing of the kind. It lacked the money, it lacked the manpower, it lacked even the basic security of its own home ground, constantly threatened as it was by the Orsini and the Colonna, as well as by the notoriously inflammable Roman populace. The “papal vicars”—mostly condottieri who were, by definition, out for what they could get—were not to be trusted for a moment; equally faithless were the major Italian states, Venice and Florence, Naples and Milan, and other cities less important but equally independent. Then there were the French, forever threatening a new invasion, and in the background Spain and—now apparently on the crest of the wave—the Ottoman Turks.

  In short, the Papacy had real or potential enemies on every side and no firm friends. To survive with its independence intact, it desperately needed adequate finance, firm administration, and astute diplomacy, and these Alexander was able to provide in full measure, however questionable his means of doing so. He proved it in only the second year of his pontificate, when he persuaded Charles VIII to leave Rome, thus saving himself and his successors from being nothing more than satraps of the French. For this alone, he deserves the gratitude of posterity. The fact that he has not received it is due largely to his private life and to the incessant vilification to which he was subjected both during his lifetime and after his death and which he tolerated with extraordinary equanimity. On more than one occasion he chided Cesare for not showing the same tolerance; it could be argued, however, that he might have done better to follow his son’s example. Many of the accusations leveled against him he could easily have disproved, had he bothered to do so; by leaving them unanswered, he contributed to his own unspeakable reputation.

  —

  DESPITE HIS EVENTUAL recovery, the sickness that struck Cesare Borgia on that fateful August 12 was to destroy his life. The disappearance of Alexander from the scene created a vacuum which brought chaos in its train; several cities rose in open revolt. A French army under Francesco Gonzaga had already reached Viterbo, only forty miles from Rome; meanwhile, a Spanish army under its brilliant young general Gonsalvo de Córdoba was hurrying northward from Naples. In normal times Cesare might have been able to deal with the situation; but now, desperately ill in the Vatican, he was powerless to take the swift military action necessary to save his career. Political action was his only hope; and that meant ensuring from his father’s successor the support he needed. He managed to secure some 100,000 ducats from his family’s private treasury, and with this, from his sickbed, he hoped to bribe the coming conclave. At all costs he must prevent the election of his most dangerous enemy, Cardinal G
iuliano della Rovere, nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, who had been living in exile in France during the greater part of Alexander’s pontificate. The surest way of achieving this was, he knew, to block the cardinal’s return to Rome.

  He failed. Della Rovere arrived unscathed, together with Cardinal Georges d’Amboise, Louis XII’s chief counselor, who was as ambitious for the tiara as he was. A third determined candidate was Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, who had broken with Alexander over his pro-French policies; now released from prison by d’Amboise in order to cast his vote for the Frenchman, he found himself unexpectedly popular and began lobbying on his own account. In fact, d’Amboise was soon effectively eliminated: a French pope at such a moment seemed almost as bad an idea as another Spanish one, particularly after della Rovere had spread the word that it would mean the second removal of the Papacy to France. The struggle seemed to be between della Rovere and Sforza; neither, however, could accumulate the votes necessary to carry the day, and the choice of the cardinals finally fell on a compromise candidate, Francesco Todeschini-Piccolomini, Archbishop of Siena, who took the name of Pius III as a tribute to his uncle Pius II. He was already sixty-four but looked and acted a good deal older and was crippled by gout. There was a general feeling that he would not last long.

  In fact, he lasted twenty-six days, one of the shortest pontificates in history. He had been a fine, upstanding churchman of unquestioned integrity and had been the only cardinal brave enough to protest when Alexander had transferred papal territories to his son the Duke of Gandia. There were strong indications that, had he lived, he would have summoned a General Council and driven through the reforms that were so desperately needed. With his death on October 18, 1503, the opportunity was lost—and it was the Church that paid the price.