The Fall of the House of Borgia

by E R Chamberlin

  BOOK CLUB ASSOCIATES • LONDON

  First published in Great Britain 1974 This edition published by Book Club Associates by arrangement with Maurice Temple Smith Ltd. Copyright (c) 1974 E. R. Chamberlin Printed in Great Britain by offset lithography by Billing & Sons Limited, Guildford and London

  Contents

  Prologue

  The Princes and the Powers

  Five powers dominated the land. In the North in the heart of the great Lombard plain lay Milan, a city curiously regular in shape and color, a polygon of rosy brick whose enormous walls protected in the mid-fifteenth century nearly a quarter of a million people—a hardworking, rather dour, rather unimaginative people, physically somewhat taller and fairer than the average Italian. Beyond the walls, another 800,000 people or so looked toward the city as the nucleus of their State. Once, these extramural citizens had belonged to communities as ancient and as fiercely independent as Milan—to Verona and Brescia, to Bergamo, Piacenza, Pavia, Lodi and occasionally some malcontent or scholarly crank would raise the cry of "Freedom" and try to lead a breakaway movement.

  But only the young or the foolish paid any attention. The mature and the sensible—the manufacturers and farmers and merchants who were making their fortunes in a boom period—were perfectly content to exchange a purely notional freedom for stability, to rid themselves of the clangor of partisan violence and settle down to make money under the strong arm of the prince. They no longer even cared that the prince was a usurper, that the line of the gorgeous Sforza dukes of Milan had been founded by a semi-bandit who had had the temerity to seize an empty throne. The Lombards were an eminently practical race, preferring to leave theory to the effervescent Tuscans.

  Four days' journey eastward from Milan, beyond the fertile plain, another power, Venice, reared itself improbably from the Adriatic, born of the sea in a blaze of mosaic and gold and marble. Its citizens referred to their republic as the Serenissima and it was, indeed, the most serene of all Italian states for it turned its back upon the turbulent peninsula while building up its astonishing maritime empire. But now the Venetians were no longer able to ignore their restless fellow-Italians: new pressures were building up, new goals disclosing themselves, new perils becoming evident in an exciting, heady, dangerous new world. In the East, Islam was rising; behind them, in the West, the rapidly expanding state of Milan posed a sudden threat. Reluctantly and then relentlessly, the Serenissima carved itself a bridgehead on the mainland until, by the 1450s, it was a power on land as well as sea. Venice shared a frontier with Milan—the Lombard plain—which was productive of much future tragedy. The Venetians were well equipped to survive in the dazzling, lethal world of the Renaissance: Trade and warfare with half the known world had not only crammed the treasury of the state, it had also made the citizens tough, subtle, wholly unscrupulous and almost fanatically patriotic. Highly intelligent, highly sophisticated though they were, this short, stocky people speaking their curious, clicking dialect created a society whose members seemed instinctively capable of reacting as a single body, no matter how complex and diverse the problem.

  The population of Venice proper was not much more than 100,000, less than half the size of its major rival, Milan, but in times of peril that population moved like a single weapon against the lumbering uncertainty of Milan.

  Beyond the Apennines, deep in the heart of Italy among the vineyards and silver glitter of the olive groves of Tuscany, the brown walls of Florence protected about 95,000 people, a fantastically growing wealth, and an uncomfortable ideal. The people were attractive, articulate, the most volatile of a highly volatile race, forever experimenting with ideas, forever coming up with some new political theory that would make an earthly paradise and turning everything upside down to accommodate it. The wealth was symbolized by the florin, the tiny coin of purest gold that was virtually an international currency, so absolute was the faith that all Europe held in the integrity of Florentine merchants. Increasingly, the Florentines were using money to make money, acting as bankers to the world—little enough of the new wealth came from the Florentine "empire." In theory, some 300,000 Tuscans acknowledged Florentine hegemony: in practice, the resentfully subject cities of Pisa, Arezzo, Prato and others cost far more to police than they yielded in tribute. And their possession, too, troubled the more thoughtful Florentines for such subjugation clashed with that disturbing, uncomfortable but ineradicable Florentine ideal—that each man had the right to order his own life within the rule of law. Already there was a prince, a ruler in fact if not in law, but the Medici rode with a very gentle touch, partly through prudence but partly, too, because they were also Florentines and "Liberty" was therefore something a little more than a political catchword.

  At the other end of Italy, eighteen days' journey from Florence, Naples lay in another world. Italian was spoken here, but an Italian of such inflection and with so curious a vocabulary that it was scarcely less alien than other European languages to the Italians of the North—even as the habits and customs of the Neapolitans were foreign to their fellow countrymen. Like the people who thronged its dark, tunnel-like streets, the physical heart of the city was an amalgam of many races. Greek, Roman, Lombard, Saracen, Norman, Angevin, Aragonese—each had had a hand in shaping the granite and the basalt and the marble that made of it the largest city in Western Europe, and each race supplanted the preceding one by conquest, imposing upon this city of nearly a million people a wholly alien dynasty so that, over the centuries, the gap between the native population and the foreign overlords grew ever wider. In consequence, the city lacked any sense of unified identity. It was unlike the cities of the North where every citizen was aware of belonging to a single body no matter how bitter and fratricidal the struggle for power. In Naples, there was no upward social movement to revivify the stale upper strata, for there was no means of crossing that gulf between the vast mass of Neapolitans and a more or less powerful, more or less sympathetic but always foreign ruling dynasty. An archaic feudalism still flourished, for in this wild, southern part of Italy, there were no great cities to challenge the king of Naples. As long as that king was powerful, the pyramidal structure of feudalism bound together the manifold aspects of the South. Of the scores of "kings" which Italy had known since the fall of the Roman Empire, the King of Naples alone survived as both a power and an idea, and for all Italians, the huge tract of land stretching almost from Rome to the southernmost shores of Italy was known simply as il Regno—the Kingdom.

  The fifth power was Rome.

  Rome in the middle of the fifteenth century was a city awakening from a long nightmare. For nearly a century there had been no effective government, for at first the popes had been absent, then they were too deeply embroiled in the Schism to worry about anything except personal survival. As a result, Rome had fallen apart both socially and physically. The city, which had sheltered up to a million people during the days of Augustus, had shrunk to perhaps 25,000 in the 1370s. The great walls remained to mark the extent of its former grandeur, but within them the tiny population pursued a life in what resembled a rural slum. Cattle grazed in the once-sacred Forum and wandered at will down the triumphal avenues; pigs rooted for sustenance where they would; the beautiful gardens became small, inefficient farms while street after street of empty houses decayed, forming breeding grounds for plague or lairs for bandits. Construction ceased, except for the constant patching up of private forts.

  During the preceding century, violence had become a casual, accepted fact of everyday life—the macabre Brotherhood of Prayer and Death made its pious rounds at dawn to collect the bodies of men slain in the streets at night. On the political level, too, there was violence. Each great Rom
an family, headed by a baron, battled for dominance in the leaderless city, and the only check upon the power of a baron was the envy and hatred of his equals. The Roman barons were a species of living fossil, for elsewhere in Italy they had been rendered extinct—in all but name. In the flourishing cities of the North, the nobles had been expelled by a middle class of merchants who had made common cause with the plebs and, with intellect sharpened by commerce, had evolved a system to limit chaos and promote brisk trade. In Florence the nobility was so impotent that it became the standard practice to ennoble a man who made a nuisance of himself, thereby in one stroke disfranchising him.

  Pride of ancestry was a dominant Roman characteristic: When young Lorenzo de' Medici married Clarice Orsini both families agreed that he had stepped up in the world even though the Medici were probably Europe's wealthiest family. Some of the clans, such as the Doria from Genoa, were Romans by adoption only; others, like the Colonna, affected to regard even Romans as upstarts and traced their lineage back to the near-mythical Etruscans. Whatever their origins, the families, once established, adopted the rigorous Roman family discipline which had survived for two millennia. The head of the clan was lord absolute with powers of life and death over his sons, his servants, his slaves. The typical family derived its economic power from its great estates in the countryside but it’s true home was in one of the dark, comfortless, immensely powerful palace- fortresses in Rome where, protected by mercenaries, it created an independent universe of its own. The barons were as much prisoners of their system of violence as the common people were its victims. Food came into the palaces from the family's estates, the corn and wine and oil brought in under heavy guard. The women lived in a kind of harem for fear of their own hired soldiers, while the men ate communally with those same mercenaries in the great hall. The family worshiped as an exclusive group in the chapel attached to the palace; their prisoners were taken down into the extensive private dungeons and the family cardinal—the vital link with the source of all power and wealth—either lodged in the palace or erected his own adjoining it.

  Technically, Rome possessed a civil government headed by an officer who bore the ancient and noble title of Prefect. But in 1420, how much the true power had passed into the hands of the pope was made clear when a unified papacy again established itself in its traditional seat and, almost immediately, order began to return to the distracted city. Violence was not eradicated—that would have been an impossible task in any Italian city—but its more motiveless, senseless outbreaks were curbed. The pope was no longer forced to rely upon the dubious loyalty of the Romans to support him in his struggle against Avignon, and he could now afford the luxury of suppressing the more blatantly criminal nobles. Despite his theoretically absolute power he would be at the mercy of the barons if they chose to rise in unison; but like most Italians, they were incapable of unified action and a skillful man could maintain relative peace by threatening one with the other. The city that had once hovered on the edge of extinction again picked up the rhythm of life. Haltingly, painfully at first, but with increasing confidence, the population slowly moved up to about fifty thousand. It was still a small city by Italian standards, but it had recovered.

  Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples, Rome—already they were anachronisms in a period when giant nation-states were edging tribalism from the stage. In the South and East a great sultan seemed to be welding Islam into one great pincer around Christendom; to the West, Spain, having crushed its alien Moor, was groping painfully toward unity; to the North, the King of France counted his income and his subjects by the millions; and even England, though temporarily distracted by the Wars of the Roses, was secure behind its bastion of fog and water. Yet all Europe continued to court or oppose these Italian city-states, dazzled —hypnotized—by their glittering past. In Italy itself the power of the five was sufficient only to maintain their position in an embattled and fragmented society, and was based far less on natural wealth or military power than on a complex of intangibles. Many of the lesser states possessed rulers of equal or even greater ability than the rulers of the five, enjoyed incomes as great, matrimonial alliances as brilliant, geographical settings as secure. Nevertheless, all other pretenders to autonomy in Italy survived as best they could by allying themselves with one or another of the five, behaving for all the world like fat sheep engaged in mock battles while the wolves gathered outside.

  In 1455 one of the wolves slipped in.

  THE COMING OF THE BORGIA

  His Excellency Don Alonso y Borja, Archbishop of Valencia, Cardinal of Quattro Coronati, did not appear to be the typical wolf. An aged, pedantic, ailing lawyer, unknown except by a tiny handful of specialists who looked upon him as a sound but highly conservative man, he had reached the time of life when most men contemplate their ultimate end rather than consider embarking on a new career. In 1455, at the age of seventy-seven, his fellow Cardinals in conclave elected him Pope—much to his sour surprise and to the amazement and then the delight of his Spanish kinsman. No matter that it was a purely stopgap election, that his major qualifications were his age and illness: In a single bewildering moment he had, theoretically, been transformed into the most powerful person in the physical universe, holder of the keys of heaven and hell, arbiter of eternity and, rather more important, Lord of Rome.

  Borgia—for so the Italians had softened his harsh Spanish name—had come to Italy nearly twenty years earlier, summoned by his master Alfonso, King of Aragon, who was intent upon the conquest of Naples. Organizing conquests of Naples was very much a European tradition and an activity in which lawyers were, on the whole, rather more valuable than soldiers. The key to Naples lay in Rome with a Papacy which claimed to be the suzerain—the ultimate feudal lord—of Naples and for nearly ten years after his arrival in Italy, Borgia trod the rounds of Chancery chambers in quest of that key while his master fought in the open field. Borgia's task was twofold: he had to persuade the Pope that an Aragonese dynasty in Naples would be a more loyal supporter than the French whom the Papacy had always favored; and he had to persuade Alfonso to recognize the rights of the ruling Pope and to ignore the Councils—last echoes of the Schism—which tried to limit the powers of that Pope. Rather remarkably, he succeeded in both apparently contradictory tasks: Alfonso gave him a palace and the Pope gave him a hat, the broad, tasselled, dull crimson hat of the Cardinal, an ugly, ungainly headpiece symbolic of greater power than the beautiful jeweled crown of many a monarch.

  The newly made Cardinal took up permanent residence in Rome in 1445. The city was then being prodded out of its squalid sleep by the energetic, scholarly little Pope Nicholas V, a virtuous priest who believed that the human values of the Renaissance could pump fresh life into Christianity. Book-learning was Nicholas's true delight—it was he who founded the Vatican Library and under his influence, genuine scholars edged out the Latin pedants who had ruled dustily in the Vatican Chancery for generations. But it was the physical body of Rome itself—the battered, filthy, time-wearied city—that he intended to turn into a monument to the glory of God and His Vicar on earth. The streets were cleaned, the viler slums demolished, the aqueducts cleared of the filth that had choked them for centuries, and foundations were laid for an enormous new Palace of the Popes on Vatican Hill.

  Cardinal Borgia took little part in all this activity. The passion for antiquity that was the driving impulse of the Renaissance was for him either meaningless or thoroughly suspect. The law was his only interest—the crabbed Latin of the canonists was his music, his literature and his art. Politics, too, passed him by. Alliances and rivalries in Rome were based on family, not national, interests and he, the sole representative of the foreign house of Borgia, had nothing to offer, no part to play in the tightly knit baronial network. He was neither a happy nor a popular man and would, in fact, have thought it a weakness to wish to be either. All his life he had followed an arid path of duty, expecting nothing, hoping for nothing but the satisfaction of duty done. The elegant literary go
ssips and socialites of Rome ignored him, for there were no pickings to be had in his frugal palace, no patronage to be obtained from an austere Spaniard whose only delight was the study of dreary law. The fact that he unobtrusively devoted a good part of his income to charity was uninteresting both to those who sought purple scandals for the pages of their diaries and those who were genuine scholars and believed that high-ranking prelates should give the lead in learning. Cardinal Alonso Borgia was simply an elderly man of poor health who had climbed high through the skilled exercise of commonplace talents. He was very unlikely to go any higher. He was twenty years older than the reigning Pope, and his colleagues in the College included men of international reputation for learning and sanctity. The laws of probability consigned him to permanent obscurity as one of the thousands of men who had, indeed, moved into the high circles of the Church but who would remain, for posterity, simply a name occurring on a handful of documents.

  Yet, when Nicholas V died at the early age of fifty- seven it was the unglamourous Cardinal Borgia who emerged from the ranks of his glittering equals as unique Pope and Supreme Pontiff. It was a common enough phenomenon. The Conclave had merely arrived at a deadlock, fragmented into small parties none of which could hope to dominate, none of which would compromise with the others. By electing an elderly and ailing man, the Cardinals were gambling on the chance that he would live long enough to allow a dominant party to emerge, but die soon enough to allow a member of the Conclave who had elected him to be elected as his successor.

  But though Alonso Borgia as Cardinal Borgia had been a sick and retiring old man, Alonso Borgia as Pope Calixtus III seemed to be rejuvenated by the sudden infusion of power—another common result that the conclave ought to have borne in mind. His health was still bad— affairs of state moved from the elegant new audience chambers of the Vatican to the Pope's hushed and shuttered private bedroom—but from that unlikely base the old man not only continued to administer the Church in a manner at least as efficient as his predecessor's, he also attempted to deploy its forces in a wholly new direction. In 1453, just two years before his unexpected election, Constantinople had at last fallen to the Turks. The capture of that city had long been inevitable, but now it demonstrated in the most drastic manner a fact of life that every Spaniard drew in with his mother's milk, that looming behind the squabbling nations of Europe had been a resourceful, courageous, merciless enemy who needed only the right leader to pose a terrible threat to Christendom. Now, under the great Sultan Mahomet II—the sultan who had grieved at the end of Constantinople but who promptly sent his war galleys probing deep into Christian waters, his vanguard deep into Christian lands—Islam at last had the leader that Christianity lacked so gravely.