They were remarkably attractive children, beautiful and intelligent, and perhaps it proved impossible for Rodrigo to forgo taking credit for their existence. They began making their appearance in society while Rodrigo was still a cardinal.
The one believed to be the eldest was named Pedro Luis, and Rodrigo was particularly eager to make a place for him. In May 1483 he provided him with 50,000 ducats to buy a fiefdom in Spain; that November Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull declaring that, in the eyes of the church, despite any possible questions about his parentage, Pedro’s birth was legitimate. His property and name secured, Pedro traveled to Spain when he was about twenty and joined the Spanish in the war against Granada. He served bravely at the siege of Ronda. At the end of 1485, Ferdinand gave the young man the prestigious title of Duke of Gandía, which included the right of hereditary transmission. A dukedom is the highest level of nobility, inferior only to kings and princes, and it was a valuable grant. The town of Gandía was delightful, beautifully laid out and located near the sea. Soon Pedro Luis built two imposing homes in Aragon, including one in Gandía and a city home in Valencia.
Moreover, King Ferdinand welcomed the young Borgia into his family, giving his approval for Pedro Luis to marry his young cousin, María Enríquez de Luna. The marriage couldn’t occur right away because María Enríquez was not yet of age, but this betrothal gave the Borgias a direct marital tie to the Spanish royal family.
Unfortunately the promising young man died on a vacation in 1488 while visiting his family in Italy. But there were heirs to spare back in Rome. The child next in line to assume Pedro’s estate and title was called Giovanni in Italy and Juan in Spain; Pedro Luis had named him as his beneficiary in his will. That meant that Juan would become the next Duke of Gandía.
There were at least three other youngsters. Cesare, handsome and sharp-witted, was destined for the priesthood, as was the custom for younger sons of noble families. By age six he was an apostolic protonotary; three months later he was named a canon of Valencia Cathedral, archdeacon of Játiva, and rector of Gandía. He was legitimized by Pope Sixtus in 1480. When his father became pope, young Cesare, then about sixteen, became archbishop of Valencia, which made him, theologically speaking, responsible for the pastoral care of everyone who lived in the province of Valencia and the Balearic islands of the Mediterranean.
A daughter Lucrezia, meanwhile, was noted for her sweet disposition and extraordinary beauty, with long, flowing golden hair and a graceful step to her walk. And there was at least one other son, a boy named Jofre.
But even the appearance of sexual immorality by clerics was anathema to Isabella. She was relentless in cleaning up corruption and nepotism within the Spanish Catholic Church, and she selected for her own religious advisers men of impeccable moral authority, chaste living, and asceticism. She had chosen as her personal confessor Hernán de Talavera, on the basis of his strict adherence to Christ-like simplicity and compassion, and when she completed her conquest of Granada, she elevated Talavera, who was from a converso family, to the important new post of archbishop of Granada, charging him with the religious shepherding of a greatly expanded flock in Andalusia, and sent him to Granada to supervise the church’s progress there.
To replace him as her confessor, she chose a hermitic former monk named Cisneros, who traveled from place to place by foot, begging for bread to eat, a practice dating from the earliest mendicant traditions. The prelate wore a coarse undergarment designed to chafe his skin, known as a hair shirt, to remind himself of the sufferings of the church martyrs, slept at night on a wooden board, and was rumored to flagellate himself as punishment for his perceived sins and shortcomings. She asked Cisneros, who joined her court with the greatest reluctance, to govern her soul with the same diligence he did his own.
Not unsurprisingly, friction emerged between Isabella and Pope Alexander VI. Early on, she complained to his ambassador to her court, Francisco des Prats, that the pope was behaving immorally by ostentatiously flaunting his out-of-wedlock children. Francisco, a Catalan, told her that Alexander’s activities were not really out of the ordinary for recent popes. He reported their conversation back to the pope and told him that he had essentially told the queen that she was being naïve. “And I revealed to her some things about Pope Sixtus and Pope Innocent, demonstrating how much more worthily Your Holiness behaved than the aforesaid [pontiffs],” he wrote to Alexander.9
The marriage arrangements for the Borgia adolescents soon caused international complications. Lucrezia had been promised to first one and then another of two Catalan gentlemen. That second engagement was terminated in November 1492.10 With her father having won the papacy, bigger things were in store for Lucrezia now.
Another, more prestigious marriage was being arranged for her, this time with Giovanni Sforza, a minor prince of the important Sforza family of Milan. He was the lord of the pretty town of Pesaro, on the Adriatic Coast. The marriage negotiations were conducted with some secrecy because of the earlier nuptials that had been planned. Marriages of ranking nobility in Spain needed approval by the sovereigns, and King Ferdinand had given his official blessing to the previous match. Then the cast-off bridegroom inconveniently showed up in Rome, requiring the pope and the Duke of Milan to pay him off to go away.
Once that matter was tended to, however, wedding plans for the new match could proceed. The ceremony was held within the Vatican. The lovely bride, Lucrezia, arrived wearing a sumptuous gown, bedecked with shining jewels. She was accompanied into the hall by nineteen-year-old Giulia Farnese, the spectacularly beautiful woman who many observers believed to be the pope’s mistress. The groom wore a long robe made of golden cloth; Lucrezia’s brothers Cesare and Juan looked on. The pope and an Italian nobleman officiated at the wedding ceremony. The pair were feted at a banquet attended by church officials and Roman nobles. Isabella was not pleased with news that the elaborate wedding party had been held in the hallowed and sacred halls of the Vatican, and she again communicated her concerns to the pope.
The queen and the pope also differed on the question of heresy and the Jews. The pope thought Ferdinand and Isabella were being unreasonably harsh in their conduct of the Inquisition and in forcing Jews to convert or leave Spain. In Rome, Jews were allowed to settle freely and to maintain their faith if they did not practice it in public. A group of Jews who left Spain took up residence in a camp near the town of Cecilia Martella, under the protection of the pope.
The Spanish ambassador to the Vatican, Diego López de Haro, was irate when he learned the pope had decided to welcome the Spanish Jews: he insisted that as head of the church, Alexander should be the first to expel them. The pope disregarded him. Ferdinand did not believe this was a matter of kindness or humanity on the pope’s part. He said Alexander allowed them to stay only because he could make money out of them by charging them extra taxes. “His Holiness makes money out of everything he can sell!” Ferdinand snorted.11
Despite these differences, Isabella was not looking for a showdown. She had some important business to conduct with the pope, and for now, points of contention were set aside. As soon as she received word from Columbus about his discoveries, she set out to make certain that she would have sole right to whatever had been found. She forwarded Columbus’s letter to the pope, asking for a determination on the ownership of these islands, even before the Genoese arrived in her court. Isabella must have sent her request to the pope by swift messengers as soon as she got word of Columbus’s discoveries.
The astute pope immediately understood, as Isabella had, the significance of the discoveries and the need for prompt action. He also understood that he owed much to the Spaniards, and particularly to Ferdinand. In addition to the political cover and support they afforded him, Ferdinand had allowed Cardinal Borgia, before becoming pope, to hold three lucrative Aragonese bishoprics at the same time, had provided a document that legitimized the pope’s son Cesare, and had nominated young Cesare to the bishoprics of Pamplona and Valencia. Ferdin
and then agreed to permit the teenager to further rise to the rank of archbishop in Valencia.
In 1493, early in his tenure, Pope Alexander was eager to similarly accommodate Isabella and promptly issued four bulls on the New World. (Bulls were legal documents stamped with a seal of lead, or bulla, giving them special authenticity and significance.) All four gave Isabella exactly what she had asked. According to the twentieth-century historian Samuel Eliot Morison:
Eager to square himself with his royal patrons, he practically let them dictate a series of papal bulls on the new discoveries, without considering the just claims of Portugal. These four bulls were not arbitrary decisions. They were acts of papal sovereignty in favor of Castile based on the Holy Father’s presumed right to dispose of newly discovered lands and heathen peoples not hitherto possessed or governed by any Christian princes.12
Three papal bulls concerning the discovery were issued on May 3 and 4, 1493, amazingly prompt for such formal documents, given that Christopher Columbus had arrived in Lisbon only two months earlier. Multiple copies of the bulls were made so that future explorers could display them to anyone who might be inclined to dispute the claims.
In the formal introductions of all four documents, the pope greeted both Ferdinand and Isabella, but interestingly, the bulls gave the discovered lands specifically to the rulers of “Castile and León,” meaning that the lands belonged to Isabella alone. Ferdinand, always quick to angle for personal advantage, must have thought that the new lands would prove to be relatively valueless; otherwise he would certainly have made sure that the documents gave him specific rights as well.
The bull dated May 4, 1493, known as Inter Caetera, neatly gave half the globe to Queen Isabella. This grant of papal sovereignty did
give, concede and assign… all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered towards west and south, [by] establishing and constituting one line from the Arctic pole, that is the north, to the Antarctic pole, that is the south, whether the mainlands and islands found and to be found are towards Indian or [toward] any other part whatever; which line shall be distant from any of the islands, which are commonly called the Azores and Cape Verde, one hundred leagues towards west and south,13
as long as the new lands were not possessed by any other Christian king.
Pope Alexander stressed, however, that these rights were granted in the expectation that religious evangelization was the primary object of the enterprise of discovery. He expected Ferdinand and Isabella to build upon their record of success in expanding Catholicism in Spain. Inter Caetera emphasized proselytizing as the justification for the territorial grant:
Among other works agreeable to the Divine Majesty and desirable to our heart this is truly the most important, that the Catholic Faith and the Christian religion, particularly in our times, shall be exalted and everywhere amplified and spread, [and] that the salvation of souls may be provided for and barbarous nations subjugated and brought to the very true faith. And whereas we are called to this Holy Seat of Saint Peter by the favour of Divine clemency, though not with like merits, and recognizing that you as true Catholic Kings and Princes, such as know that you have ever been, and as your famous deeds already well known to almost the entire world prove, not merely desired this, but with every possible effort study and diligence, sparing no labours, no expenses, no dangers, shedding even your own blood, are accomplishing it and have devoted to this aim already for a long time your entire mind and all your efforts, such as attests the recovery of the kingdom of Granada from the tyranny of the Saracens, achieved in these very times with such great glory to the Divine name. Justly we are induced and not undeservedly, and we ought even spontaneously and graciously to concede to you the means whereby you may be enabled to prosecute a purpose so sacred and praiseworthy and so agreeable to the immortal God with daily increasing fervor to the glory of God himself and the propagation of the Christian Empire.14
The pope wrote, in the same bull, that the colony that his “beloved son Christopher Columbus” had established in the New World, with “one sufficiently well fortified tower, in which he has placed certain Christians who had gone with him,” had begun the process of establishing the new empire.15 He was referring, of course, to the little community that Columbus had left behind when the Santa María ran aground.
The Portuguese, naturally, were not happy with the pope’s ruling on who had which rights to undiscovered lands. Isabella and King João of Portugal therefore negotiated their own division of the globe, in talks held in Castile, at the town of Tordesillas. The agreement they reached in June 1494, known as the Treaty of Tordesillas, pushed the north-to-south dividing line west to 370 leagues from the islands of Cape Verde, instead of the pope’s 100 leagues to the west, thereby allowing Portugal to retain all rights to the coast of Africa that Castile had already conceded. The Portuguese were pleased: they may have sent exploratory ships west as soon as Columbus came back in 1493 and found a large bulge of land in the east of the South American continent, present-day Brazil, which would now fall within their sphere. The resolution of the dispute, at least at this time, and from the perspective of Isabella and João, was that Spain now owned the western side of the new lands, and Portugal owned the southern section, which included both Brazil and the African coast. The two cousins had divided the cookie in half.
Now other parts of the world had to be apportioned as well. Ferdinand, for his part, wanted the pope to favor his Neapolitan relations to govern the Kingdom of Naples. At the time Rodrigo became pope, Ferdinand’s younger sister, Juana, was queen of Naples, married to their cousin, Ferrante, who was king. Rodrigo, in fact, had performed the wedding ceremony and coronation for them.16 The ruling families of Aragon and Naples, therefore, were closely linked and generally allies.
Naples was a very rich kingdom, heavily populated, with a spectacular physical setting; the kingdom’s holdings comprised the entire southern half of the Italian peninsula. Naples consequently played a huge role in Mediterranean commerce and was eyed with envy by a number of other European powers, including, most notably, France. The French believed they had a legitimate claim to the Kingdom of Naples because they had held the throne before it was taken by conquest by Alfonso the Magnanimous, Ferdinand’s uncle. The pope was being asked for a final determination on who the rightful king or queen should be. The previous pope, Innocent VIII, had feuded with Ferrante and decided he preferred King Charles VIII of France, which obviously created potential problems.
In addition, the ruling family of Milan, the Sforza clan, was also feuding with the family of King Ferrante of Naples. Ludovico Sforza added his encouragement to Charles VIII, telling him that if he invaded Italy and seized Naples, the Sforzas would help him. All this meant that pressures were mounting on the Neapolitan rulers, even as the new pope, Rodrigo Borgia, took office. King Ferrante of Naples and King Ferdinand of Aragon wanted to make sure the pope endorsed Ferrante’s continuing control of the realm.
To aid his cousins, Ferdinand made an offer that Alexander VI couldn’t refuse. In mid-year 1493, Diego López de Haro, the Spanish envoy to the Vatican, went to the papal court to offer his homage. In exchange for the pope’s support for the Aragonese claims to the throne of Naples, he was authorized to offer to permit Borgia’s son Juan to marry Ferdinand’s cousin María Enríquez de Luna. This was a great opportunity for the social-climbing Borgia clan. Alexander told his son Juan that he wanted this royal connection but was also hoping to obtain former Moorish estates in Granada from Queen Isabella, now or in the near future.17
There was another alliance-building nuptial proposition as well. The Neapolitan ruling family offered King Ferrante’s illegitimate granddaughter, Sancia, in marriage to the pope’s son Jofre, along with a generous dowry. It gave the pope yet another royal nuptial for his offspring, and the two teenagers were married in 1494.
In exchange, the pope gave Kings Ferdinand and Ferrante what they requested, which was continuing control of Naple
s in Trastámara family hands. When Ferrante died in early 1494, the pope announced that the crown would go to Ferrante’s son Alfonso, not to King Charles VIII of France. That decision, of course, angered both the French and the Milanese, who began to plot together to upend the pope’s decision and undermine his alliance with the House of Aragon.
The marriage between Juan Borgia and Ferdinand’s cousin María Enríquez was an extravagant and memorable affair, representing as it did the triumph of the Aragonese Borgia clan, who had now made good. Juan was sent with an entourage and presents worthy of a royal wedding. His father loaded him up with valuable merchandise to take to Spain, including “boxes and boxes of rich velvet, damask, brocade, cloth of silver, satin and furs… cushions, bedcovers studded with gold, bed hangings in white damask brocade with gold fringes and crimson satin lining, tapestries woven with the history of Alexander the Great, and of Moses, huge quantities of table silver.” And there were jewels: a pendant with a huge emerald and a huge diamond for Juan to wear attached to his cap, and for the duchess, a golden cross studded with pearls and diamonds, encapsulating a piece of the True Cross, which had been placed there by the Holy Father himself.18
The ostentatiousness of the enterprise attracted much critical comment. “This Duke leaves very rich and loaded with jewels, money and other valuable portable goods and silver,” the Mantuan envoy reported. “It is said he will return within a year but leave all his goods in Spain and come back to reap another harvest.”19
Isabella: The Warrior Queen Page 34
