The Fall of the House of Borgia

by E R Chamberlin

  A point which Boccaccio overlooked, but which was picked up by the coldly observant eye of Burchard was that the pope's eldest son Cesare was merely "among those present." It was the favorite second son, Juan, who had the honor of leading the bride in the procession even though he should have been in Spain, at his own wedding, and had specifically postponed his departure for the purpose of giving his sister away.

  The honor granted to him, at Cesare's expense, on that wedding day was all of a piece with the treatment he had received throughout his life from his father. Carlo Canale, the third husband of Vannozza, who discreetly described himself as Juan's stepfather, once told a friend that the surest way to the pope's favor was by flattering this younger son. Alexander's preference was curious. Compared with Cesare, Juan was a nonentity—boastful, arrogant, empty—reviving with his contemporaries the old hatred and fear of the Spaniard. He shared Cesare's auburn hair, good looks and fraternal hatred but little else. There was a mean, petty streak in him, well demonstrated by an incident which took place in Ascanio Sforza's palace. During a reception Juan, lolling about, was loudly criticizing the appearance and manners of the other guests. One young man took exception to being called a pig and made some remark about a "priest's bastard." Juan leaped to his feet, but instead of striking the man down as Cesare would have done, he rushed to the Vatican and complained to his father. Alexander promptly ordered a detachment of the palace guard to arrest the guest and hang him. The order was executed despite the fact that the victim, as a guest, was under the powerful protection of the vice-chancellor of the Church.

  It was perhaps typical of Juan that he should make a friend of Djem Sultan, the brother of the Sultan Bajacet. Djem was now part guest, part hostage of Alexander because Bajacet paid a very useful forty thousand ducats annually into the papal coffers as long as Djem, a potential rival, was kept in Rome safely out of the way. He both fascinated and horrified the Romans.

  The appearance of this barbarian prince is fierce and cruel, his body is well knit and strongly built. He is above medium height, has one defective eye and a head which is never still as he gazes threateningly around. If this venomous serpent breaks his bonds and escapes from the cage in which Christians have secured him alas—what destruction and wounds he will inflict upon us if only he have power.34

  At thirty, Djem was nearly twice Juan's age and exerted an extraordinary influence over him. Romans had a double cause for scandal, witnessing the seventeen-year-old son of the pope, dressed in oriental turban, robes and slippers, with a large curved dagger at his belt, walking arm-in-arm with the brother of the Grand Turk, the implacable enemy of Christendom. No one, however, was unwise enough to complain to the pontiff. The execution of Sforza's wretched guest had shown clearly the limits of Alexander's tolerance.

  At the age of fourteen Juan had inherited the estate and title duke of Gandia from his dead half-brother Pedro. No empty title, it carried with it a great palace in Spain and large territories to uphold that dignity. He inherited more, for Pedro had been betrothed to Maria Enriquez, cousin of King Ferdinand, and Ferdinand now agreed that she should be transferred tojuan. It was the first major dynastic coup of Alexander's pontificate, for it linked him intimately with the royal house of a united Spain. Queen Isabella deeply disliked the idea, partly as a result of her longstanding suspicion of Alexander, but mostly, it seems, from a contempt for Juan himself. "He was a very bad man," the Spanish chronicler Bernaldez recorded flatly. "Proud, puffed up with arrogance and evil thoughts, cruel and entirely unreasonable." Nevertheless, Isabella gave way to her husband as she did in most things concerned with the Borgia, and Juan was duly accepted as the bridegroom. In 1492, during the crowded months following Alexander's coronation and in the midst of a most delicate political situation, the pope found time and energy to prepare his son's debut in Spain. Juan was not only his beloved son, but also the means of consolidating the Borgia base in its native country and Juan's circumstances were to be correspondingly magnificent. Andrea Boccaccio, that ubiquitous Ferrarese ambassador in Rome, was keeping a close watch on the emergence of this new family, informing his master of trivial and major events alike so that a composite picture could be formed in Ferrara. Juan would depart like a potentate, he wrote. "In a shop under my house there is a famous goldsmith who for months has done nothing but set jewels in rings and necklaces and buy every kind of precious stone. He showed me everything. There are great pearls in infinite numbers, rubies, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, all in perfect condition."35

  Juan was ready to leave by the late spring of 1493, but Alexander insisted that he should stay for Lucrezia's wedding and it was not until September that he finally left Rome. His cortege was enormous. Extravagant gifts for the bride and her royal relatives, clothes and equipment for Juan and his huge personal household, ornaments in precious metals and woods, many of them wrought by the splendid new race of artists—together they represented not merely a prince's suite but one of the vital channels whereby the new culture that had risen in Italy flowed out and began to irrigate Spain. But in addition to priceless artifacts, Juan took with him his father's concern. If a plenitude of advice could make a man, then Spain should have received the ideal prince in the shape of Juan Borgia. Alexander's letter to him was a curiously touching admixture of hard-headed political instructions and a fatherly care that his son should be at home in a foreign land, with much earnest advice as to the right method of dressing the hair in the Spanish mode, the correct form of dress and the like. The pope prided himself on his knowledge of Spanish customs and affairs, and though that knowledge was outdated, for over twenty years had passed since his last visit to Spain, it could have still been of value to a young man whose entire life had been passed in the sophisticated world of Rome.

  Juan gave no evidence of profiting from that advice. It was not altogether his fault for, apart from the inherent weakness of his character, he was condemned to be eternally an alien—a Spaniard in Italy and an Italian in Spain, lacking either the intuition to identify himself with the society in which he found himself or the strength to force respect from it. Within a few weeks of his arrival in Spain, Alexander was obliged to write to him again, this time in fierce anger, for Juan's loutish behavior imperiled the delicate balance of Borgia influence in Spain. He had treated his highborn bride with the ultimate insult, not bothering to consummate the marriage, instead preferring to roam the streets of Barcelona with a gang of highborn rowdies. Italians, and particularly Romans, would have laughed; the Spaniards were incensed, and thereafter Alexander kept the closest watch on Juan, empowering his envoys to discipline him if necessary. Juan was never to learn political sense, but he was a good-looking young man, possessing sufficient of the Borgia charm first to mollify his indignant young wife and then to turn her into his willing slave.

  In September 1493, at about the time when Juan's immense caravan was leisuredly traveling south and at about the time when Lucrezia was unenthusiastically inspecting her new home in Pesaro, Alexander married off his fourth child by Vannozza, the eleven-year-old Joffre. The bride was Sancia, the illegitimate daughter of the heir to the throne of Naples and this time Juan did not bother to defer his departure to Spain: there were no priceless gifts; there was not even a bride, for the marriage in the Vatican was by proxy. The Neapolitan nobleman who took the part of the bride put on a splendid act of buffoonery, exhibiting an excruciating coyness as the vows were changed. But that was all which enlivened a purely paper transaction. The cold little ceremony, however, marked a moment of far more importance than Lucrezia's splendid wedding to a nonentity; of greater importance even than Juan's match with a Spanish heiress. Joffre's marriage shows Alexander, as pope, finally tackling the nagging papal problem of Naples which every pope, sooner or later, had to face. The marriage has Alexander, as a Spaniard, entering into an alliance with the major Spanish power on the Italian mainland. And the marriage is the moment when Alexander, as a Borgia, united his family with King Ferrante of Naples and h
is son Alfonso, perhaps the most evil and certainly the most hated men in Italy.

  Over half a century had passed since the Spanish House of Aragon had thrown out the French Angevins from Naples and settled down to rule in their stead but, as far as the ordinary Neapolitan was concerned, the Aragons

  were, and remained, as alien as the dynasty they had supplanted. The Neapolitans had rather liked the first Aragonese king, old Alfonso I—flatterers called him The Magnanimous and it was accurate enough as such sobriquets went. He abandoned all claims to his native Aragon and devoted all his energy to Naples, incidentally giving a Renaissance veneer to its polymorphous culture. A strong man, ruthless when necessary but on the whole a good man —such was the general verdict on Alfonso I when he died in 1458.

  The nature of his son and successor, Ferrante, therefore came as a considerable shock. Italians, even Neapolitans, rarely took active pleasure in cruelty but there was about Ferrante a quality of refined evil that pointed up his alien ancestry. It was a cruelty which surpassed even that expected from a Spaniard and gave substance to the whispered charge that his unknown, unacknowledged mother had been a Moor. He gloated over torture and preferred mental to physical pain. His aged secretary, who had served both him and his father for decades, desperately tried to buy his master's continuing favor with gifts of land and money when he suspected that his days were numbered. Ferrante smilingly accepted everything until all had been given and then struck the old man down. Those enemies who fell into his hands were chained in cages among which he liked to stroll as at a zoo. Legend had it that when death at last released their souls, Ferrante still kept their bodies, embalming them so that he could continue to gloat over them.

  But Ferrante, unfortunately for his subjects, was not only skilled in cruelty: He was also a statesman of supreme ability, surviving in the approved manner by playing his enemies off one against the other. For forty years, the enormous kingdom of Naples lay quiet in his grasp, its turbulent barons seemingly hypnotized by the nature of their monarch. Innocent VIII, Alexander's immediate predecessor, had tried to exert the papacy's theoretical right of control over Naples by stirring up trouble among the barons. Fer- rante crushed the incipient rebellion with sickening cruelty, fought the papacy to a standstill and declined to pay any other tribute except the traditional annual gift of a white horse.

  Much of Ferrante's power derived from the fact that he was skilled and fortunate in those marriage negotiations which bound the states of Italy into an intricate web. His daughter, Eleonora, was the wife of Ercole d'Este, the tough old duke of Ferrara. Her two daughters, the beautiful Beatrice and Isabella, had married Ludovico Sforza of Milan and Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua respectively. The daughter of Ferrante's son Alfonso was, by title at least, the duchess of Milan although both she and her husband remained in the shadow of Ludovico, the regent of Milan. At the age of seventy, Ferrante could congratulate himself on a stable kingdom at home supported by a network of dynastic alliances.

  Then, abruptly, this new family had risen above the horizon, these part-Spanish Borgia with their ravening ambitions, backed by the enormous power of the Keys, creating their own wide-ranging alliances that might, in time, throttle even the House of Aragon. Ferrante's first instinct had been to try and outflank them; that was why he had written to his kinsman the king of Spain in the spring of 1493 protesting against Alexander's mode of life. That move failed, for Ferdinand of Spain was not yet ready to interfere in Italian affairs. Almost immediately afterwards the long-standing alliance between Milan and Naples collapsed when Ludovico Sforza usurped the throne of Milan and, as if that were not enough, Alexander then married his daughter Lucrezia into the Sforza clan.

  Ferrante found himself floundering wildly for balance after years of manipulating the balance of others. He could not outflank the Borgia; he could not attack them; could he perhaps join them by the recognized means of a matrimonial alliance? His first move was to try and obtain Cesare as husband for Sancia, the illegitimate daughter of his son Alfonso. Alexander toyed with the idea but then stuck to his decision to retain Cesare in his holy calling and obligingly offered the boy Joffre instead. The youngest, instead of the eldest son, represented by no means so good a match but Ferrante, by now thoroughly off balance, had no choice but to accept. He had to accept, too, the knowledge that should a better political alliance occur to Alexander before the eleven-year-old Joffre was eventually bedded with Sancia, then that marriage would go the way of other proxy Borgia marriages.

  In January 1494, just five months after that proxy marriage, Ferrante died—"sine luce, sine cruce, sine Deo" as Burchard tersely put it. The fate of Ferrante's heir, Alfonso, and of the entire Spanish dynasty in Naples now lay in the plump bejeweled hands of Alexander for he alone, as pope and suzerain of Naples, had power to crown the next king of Naples. But if Alfonso lay, quite literally, at the mercy of Alexander, Alexander himself had most urgent need of Alfonso. The uneasy—the unnatural—calm that had prevailed throughout Italy since Alexander's election was on the verge of breaking up, the traditional enemies of the papacy having joined hands with the Spaniard-haters to threaten his very survival. Worse, far worse, was the news that yet another French campaign to conquer Naples was being planned. Such plans were commonplace enough, but this one differed from the rest in that the leader was the idealistic young king of France himself, Charles VIII, whose ultimate aim was nothing less than a Crusade to recover Jerusalem. Charles had already announced his intention of claiming the crown of Naples as a descendant of the legitimate Angevin dynasty. A standard move that. But he had also announced his intention of reforming the papacy as a by-product, and the only way the papacy could be reformed was by removing its current head. A large army was being formed in France, and the French ambassador in Rome had already appeared before Alexander mingling threats with promises in an attempt to persuade him to abandon Alfonso and restore the legitimate Angevin dynasty in the person King Charles of France.

  Alfonso, closely watching events from Naples, was well aware of the changed position and in February 1494 despatched a splendid embassy to Rome. The ambassadors presented the traditional white horse to the pope, humbly recommended their master, and heavily hinted that it would be as well to settle matters while both parties had freedom of movement. Alexander agreed that the proxy marriage between Joffre and Sancia should now be consummated as swiftly as possible but, aware of Alfonso's vulnerable position, he drove a very hard bargain indeed, a bargain which would not only enrich Joffre but his two brothers also. The proxy marriage had already made Joffre prince of Squillace and lord of Cariato with a guaranteed annual income of ten thousand ducats. Now the boy was invested with one of the seven great offices of Naples, that of Grand Protonotary, and received in addition a further income of ten thousand ducats annually in recognition of his services as a military commander. His brother Juan, then strutting in Spain as the duke of Gandia, became a Neapolitan nobleman—prince of Tricarico—with appropriate estates and income plus a salary of thirty-three thousand ducats for military services which were as purely notional as were Joffre's. In the bargaining Cesare received less glamorous and marginally less lucrative appointments. Four days after the contract was signed, his head had been shaved in its first tonsure, the physical manifestation of his father's determination to make him a priest. Nevertheless, there were many rich benefices in Alfonso's hands and Cesare was able to pick up a comfortable four thousand ducats a year to add to his income. The most loyal of Alfonso's advisers might have pondered the curious potency of matrimonial alliances in state affairs. In exchange for the honor of uniting the bastard daughter of King Alfonso with the bastard son of Pope Alexander, the Neapolitan treasury was not only committed to paying out nearly seventy thousand ducats a year for the next generation, but in the kingdom itself two more foreign territorial lords had been established.

  The crowning of King Alfonso of Naples, and the wedding of Don Joffre Borgia with Donna Sancia d'Aragona were affairs of great eno
ugh state to warrant the presence in Naples of the papal master of ceremonies himself. Accordingly, Burchard left his familiar quarters in the Vatican palace on April 20, 1494, accompanied by four servants newly dressed at his own expense and, despite vile weather, journeyed to Naples in four days. Both the coronation, on May 7, and Joffre's wedding, which took place four days later, went smoothly. Burchard had a lively argument with his Neapolitan opposite number regarding the exact nature of Alfonso's oath of fealty to the papacy, but Johannes got his way so that the king was obliged to acknowledge specifically that he ruled only by grace of the pope. At the wedding Burchard noted, shocked, how the queen's attendants openly helped themselves to the golden ducats which Joffre ceremonially offered his bride. Joffre aroused considerable amusement with the hastiness of his reply to the formal question "Do you accept this woman," a quickness which was totally out of keeping with his childish face and form and which was certainly not shared by his bride.

  Sancia was sixteen years of age, a beauty even in this court of voluptuous women, rather less innocent than her unmarried status implied and wholly contemptuous of the child with whom she was about to be bedded for the greater glory of the papacy and the kingdom of Naples. Her discontent was temporarily reduced by the sight of the rich presents her bridegroom brought her: the necklaces of pearls, the ornaments of rubies and diamonds and emeralds, the golden rings set with immense gems, the lengths of brocades and silks and velvets, all warming the feminine eye and heart. But one needed no worldly knowledge to predict that this particular marriage was unlikely to run smoothly. That, however, was no concern of His Holiness's master of ceremonies. Johannes Burchard, his duty done, turned tourist, gaping at the natural steam baths, the sulphur springs and other abundant marvels of the landscape around Naples before returning to Rome, well content with himself and his world, leaving Don Joffre Borgia to make himself at home as well he might in the kingdom of Naples. But elsewhere in Italy the uncertain calm was about to break into a full storm, menacing not only the much-threatened kingdom itself but also Don Joffre's father and the whole future of the Borgia clan.