The Fall of the House of Borgia

by E R Chamberlin

  6 The French Invasion

  Milan, the state destined to fall and drag the others to ruin with it, was to all appearances the most solidly based of those five powers which dominated Italy. Unlike Venice, it was unaffected by the rising power of Islam. Unlike Florence, it drew its wealth from an immensely fertile region, and its subject cities had long been rendered truly subordinate. And unlike Naples and Rome, Milan possessed a ruler who could reasonably be argued to be of native and of popular stock.

  Technically, Ludovico Sforza was merely the regent of Milan, ruling on behalf of his young nephew, Gian Galeazzo Sforza, the true duke of Milan. But the ailing, spiritless boy and his vivid but helpless wife, Isabella, were being pushed ever further into the background by the splendid Ludovico, epitome of the Renaissance prince. "Born for the ruin of Italy," was the pronouncement of his contemporary and biographer, Palo Giovio, an opinion echoed and elaborated until the entire responsibility for the Italian tragedy was placed upon Ludovico's plump shoulders. He was just twenty-nine years old when he settled himself in his illegal throne. His nickname, "II Moro," was simply a version of his baptismal name, Maurus, but flatterers gave it a special significance. One meaning of the word "Moro" was "mulberry," supposedly the wisest of plants because it is the last to put out leaves after the winter and the first to bear fruit. Delighted, Ludovico adopted the mulberry as part of his insignia; mulberry became the fashionable coloring among the ladies and gentlemen of the Milanese court, and the fruit itself appeared repeatedly in frescoes and carvings. But "Moro" could also be interpreted as "Moor"—the skilled, cunning and resourceful native of Africa—and this interpretation, too, Ludovico adopted. Sometimes both interpretations were used, together, as in that hypocritical painting in which Ludovico—half Moor, half mulberry tree—shelters his helpless young nephew, the duke of Milan. But usually it was as a Moor that Ludovico appeared in iconography, such as in his favorite propaganda painting, in which he is shown in the guise of a Moorish servant brushing the hem of Italy's dress.

  For it was as arbiter of Italy's fate that he saw himself —and as others saw him in the first years of his rule, dazzled as they were by the splendor of his court. Milan's great wealth in the blooming years of the Renaissance enabled it to attract fashionable talent to the court; so that in the eyes of contemporaries, it was Milan rather than Florence that was the home of the new culture. Ludovico possessed a genuine sensitivity and love of the new world of the mind, to which he gave expression not only through the obvious means of commissioning frescoes and sculptures, but also in the less glamorous maintenance of scholars and writers whose works by no means automatically flattered their patron. Leonardo da Vinci came to Milan, bringing with him his lyre shaped like a horse's head, his notebooks, his schemes for fortifications, waterworks and strange new weapons; and found good employment as musician, court painter and deviser of entertainments. The historians, lawyers and philosophers at the University of Pavia had their salaries doubled. The great castle of Porta Giovia in Milan, the home of the prince, was renovated and decorated in the glowing colors of the new art. The streets of the city, too, were cleaned, the casually built obstructions of many years removed, the houses painted.

  Despite his nickname of the Moor, Ludovico had the fair good looks of the Lombard Italian. Naturally inclined to plumpness, his face had been fleshed out by good living to an almost feminine softness, a gentleness of contour oddly at variance with the massive nose and chin of the Sforza. The contrast reflected something of his dual nature: When fortune favored him he was strong, resolute, confident; but in adversity he crumbled—rapidly. Philip de Co- mines, whose master King Louis XII of France was to destroy this glowing court of Milan, summed up their victim's character in a single sentence. "This Ludovico was a wise man but very timorous and humble when he was in awe— and false when it was to his advantage. And this I do not speak by hearsay but as one that knew him well, having had many transactions with him."

  Those who later sought a single, dramatic explanation for the root cause of the destruction of Italian freedom claimed to find it in the jealous rivalry which Ludovico's beautiful, ambitious and much-loved wife, Beatrice d'Este held for Isabella d'Aragona, the wife of her husband's nephew. Certainly the explanation simplified a fantastically complex situation, substituting for an incoherent tangle of political and personal motives the classic simplicity of feminine jealousy triggering off the French invasion which, in turn, was to lay Italy open to more foreign adventurers. There was an added poignancy in the fact that Ludovico's wife and his nephew's wife were cousins, for both were granddaughters of old Ferrante of Naples—an excellent example of the dynastic web which was throttling Italy. But there parity ended between the young women. Beatrice was a daughter of the brilliant—and nearby—court of Ferrara and married to a powerful man who doted upon her: Isabella's closest relatives lived at the other end of Italy and her husband was an invalid youth. Beatrice d'Este was not only a great beauty with an infectious charm of manner, she was also an intellectual in her own right and so an ideal partner for Ludovico. Her early death—a few months after the French invasion—shattered him and may well have led to the undermining of his will to resist at a critical moment. There was nothing he would not do for her; but there was only one gift that she, the most favored of women, really wanted. For all practical purposes she and Ludovico ruled Milan, but the ducal crown still remained legally on the head of Ludovico's ailing nephew Gian Galeazzo and, while he lived, Beatrice could never call herself duchess of Milan.

  It is probable that in the private chambers of their imposing castle, Beatrice prodded her husband toward the brink, to some solution of the galling situation. But had she never existed, even had she been as humble and submissive in practice as in the theory of her marriage vow, Ludovico would have inevitably trodden that path by himself. In order to enjoy his illegal power, he had to place his nephew under increasing restraint, amounting at last to virtual imprisonment, as the boy grew to manhood. Later, after the invasion and all the tragedy that came from it, he opened his heart to the Venetian ambassador, Marco Foscari. "I confess that I have done great wrong to Italy, but I had to act because of the position I was in. I did it most reluctantly." The ambiguous situation in Milan could not have continued indefinitely. The Milanese might have accepted the situation equably enough, but Isabella's Neapolitan kinsmen, her father Alfonso and her grandfather Ferrante, would sooner or later abandon diplomatic protest for armed threat. Isabella herself, as spirited as her husband was supine, objected strongly. She was being robbed of a crown and she let the world know. In 1493 she wrote a bitter letter to her father, spelling out the humiliations imposed upon a princess of Aragon, describing how she and her husband, the true duke and duchess of Milan, depended for the very necessities of life upon Ludovico's charity.

  Everything is in his power, while we are left without friends or money and are reduced to live as private persons. Not Gian Galeazzo but Ludovico is recognized as lord of the kingdom, the true duke. His wife has lately born him a son, whom everyone prophesies will succeed to the dukedom, and royal honors were paid to him at his birth while we and our children are treated with contempt. We live here at risk to our lives. ... If you have fatherly compassion, if love of me and the sight of my tears can move your soul, I implore you to come to our help and deliver your daughter and son-in-law from the fear of slavery, restoring them once more to their rightful kingdom.36

  Isabella's father Alfonso wanted to wage outright immediate war upon the Milanese upstart but her grandfather Ferrante, seasoned by thirty-five years of Italian intrigue, declined to do anything so foolish. He worked in the approved manner, steadily undermining Ludovico's position while putting on an appearance of perfect friendship. It had been an alarming time for Ferrante when Alexander had married off Lucrezia to Giovanni Sforza, even though Giovanni, lord of the dreary little city of Pesaro, was small fry. But Ferrante had neatly countered that by bringing about the proxy marriage between his illegitim
ate granddaughter Sancia and Alexander's son Joffre, if at a rather higher price than he had wanted to pay. That was the correct way of doing things, countering threat with threat and plot with plot. Only fools went to war when the same results could be obtained by judicious bribery. Then in January 1494— "the first year of the miserable years"—he died. Alfonso succeeded him. And Ludovico found himself faced with a man who combined political enmity and personal hatred with an unpredictable impetuousness. Given Ludovico's position and his supreme self-confidence, there was little surprise that he, a political dwarf, should have attempted to wield a giant's club. He invoked the enormous power of France and precipitated a French invasion with all its incalculable consequences, to distract his enemy Alfonso. As inevitably he overbalanced, the delicate equilibrium of Italy collapsed and nearly brought down Alexander Borgia with it.

  The current owner of the giant's club was another political dwarf, King Charles VIII of France. Italian writers vied with each other to execrate his memory, their judgments ranging from the coldly corrosive portraits created by professional diplomats to the spontaneous, astonished reaction of a bystander who saw him on his entry into Rome. "The king of France was the ugliest man I have ever seen in all my days—tiny, deformed with the most appalling face that ever man had." Philip de Comines, who served King Charles as well as his successor King Louis, was considerably kinder to his memory for he knew the empty- headed young man well. Comines could not but admit what everyone knew, that "neither his treasury, his understanding nor his preparations were sufficient for such an important enterprise." But Comines thought Charles meant well, desiring not only the glory of another crown but also the honor of cleansing the papacy. "He was the most affable and best-natured man in the world. I verily believe that he never said a word to any man that could in reason cause displeasure. I do really think I was the only person in the whole world he was unkind to—but being sensible it was in his youth I could not resent it."37

  To the Italians who experienced the invasion, the eruption of an immense French army across the barrier of the Alps appeared as some natural force, inevitable as an avalanche, inescapable as a swarm of locusts. But Comines had a considerably different viewpoint. He was closely involved in the affair from its cloudy beginnings to its tragic end; from the moment when Charles announced his decision to conquer Jerusalem, occupy his ancestor's throne in Naples, and reform the papacy, to the time when the remnants of the once-proud army straggled back across the Alps. And it was Comines's impression that the invasion was a deplorable accident that probably would never have happened had Charles been taken seriously at the outset.

  "To all persons of experience it was looked upon as a very dangerous undertaking nor indeed was anyone for it but himself and one Stephen de Vers, a man of very mean extraction and one who had never seen or had the least knowledge of military affairs. There was also one Brigonnet, who was of the council—but his nerve failed him and he shrunk his neck out of the collar."38 Even when Charles's counselors became aware that he really intended an invasion, they seem to have assumed that he intended sending a token force; and it is possible that at this stage he did not plan to go in person. Then in rapid succession two Italians arrived at his court. The first was a Milanese bearing a letter in which his master, Ludovico Sforza, promised fullest support to the French. The second visitor was a Genoese, the cardinal of San Pietro in Vincoli, Giuliano della Rovere, "fatal instrument then, before and after, of all the calamities of Italy." Sforza's letter promised a smooth passage through the easily defended Alpine gateway into Italy, della Rovere's presence offered the means of an attack upon the Neapolitan king's major ally in Italy, the pope himself.

  The relationship between Guiliano della Rovere and Alexander adds, for posterity, another twist to the Borgia story, creates one more mystery that cannot be resolved even by conjecture, for the elements are self-contradictory. The College of Cardinals was by now almost wholly a political arena in which representatives of the embattled city- states of Italy and their transalpine allies sought to overcome each other. Apart from one or two men who had, almost miraculously, maintained the Christian impulse that had originally brought them into the Church, the cardinals themselves had entirely abandoned the last pretense of exercising a spiritual office, the means having obscured the ends ofoffi.ee at last. The cardinals might have claimed, in their defense, that their roles were thrust upon them, the inescapable result of the papacy's position as a major Italian power which they, either as good sons of the Church or loyal citizens of their own states, had to defend or attack as with any other power.

  Guiliano della Rovere was an excellent example of the new breed of prelate which, during the next two centuries, was to embroil the papacy ever deeper in the battles of Europe; a breed in which it is impossible to determine where personal ambition ended and loyalty to the state began—and where it is equally impossible to detect any activities with a purely spiritual motivation. Della Rovere was, primarily, a realist for whom "treachery" and "loyalty" were synonymous with "expediency," and who added to that convenient definition the Italian ability to equate honor with survival. After losing the battle of the conclave to his enemy, Borgia, della Rovere should have followed the established pattern and attempted either to weaken his enemy from within or—and the alternative was the more popular and sensible—gone over to him, and in exchange for the promise of powerful support, built up his position in readiness for the next conclave. He did neither. Almost immediately he turned to open, direct hostility, and except for a few occasions when his own definition of expediency obliged him to support Alexander, della Rovere maintained contemptuous hatred throughout the pontificate. It obliged him to move counter to his own personal preferences. He allied himself with the devious Ludovico Sforza, the natural enemy of his own state of Genoa, and summoned into Italy those foreigners whom he was to spend the greater part of his own pontificate in chasing out. Delia Rovere's uncharacteristic reaction intrigued his contemporaries. It could hardly arise from any Christian abhorrence of the character of Christianity's high priest, for no sensible cardinal would allow such an objection to influence his political actions. The reaction did not seem to rise from the common dynastic rivalry that colored most people's reaction to the Borgia. Delia Rovere held nothing but contempt for his cousin, Girolamo Riario. No children were credited to della Rovere; and when he at last ascended the papal throne, Italians were astonished by the fact that he seemed almost free from nepotism. Seeking an explanation for della Rovere's actions, the gossips claimed that Borgia had supplanted him in the affections of Vannozza Catanei, and that the young man who went by the name of Cesare Borgia should, by rights, have borne the name of della Rovere. The viciousness with which Giuliano attacked Cesare when eventually he had the power could as forcefully affirm as negate the rumor; but otherwise his dour, harsh, character gave no indications of such a motivation. All that Rome knew for certain was that Giuliano della Rovere held such a personal hatred for Alexander Borgia that he would defy the normal canons of political behavior to satisfy it.

  Immediately after Alexander's coronation, della Rovere had left Rome for his own city, the port of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber whose control enabled him to cut Rome's communication with the sea. Ostia became the center of the opposition to Alexander, and both cardinal and pope took extraordinary precautions against the possibility of either assassination or armed attack. Once when Alexander, returning to Rome from a tour of the states, was greeted by the customary salute from the guns of Sant'

  Angelo, persons with him thought he was going to faint, so convinced was he that the cannonade signaled an attack. The two men were briefly reconciled, for each still maintained allies in the same camp—notably Naples—but the fragile relationship was shattered by the most bitter quarrel of all between them when, in the Consistory of September 1493, Alexander bestowed cardinal's hats upon his son, Cesare, and upon Alessandro Farnese, the young brother of his mistress Giulia. When in the following March, Alexande
r made his compact with Alfonso, the new king of Naples, Giuliano della Rovere took himself to France.

  He arrived in Avignon at a critical moment. The difficulties and dangers of the French expedition were daily becoming more apparent. Few informed Frenchmen had any faith in Ludovico Sforza; and it was common knowledge that Stephen de Vers, the most consistent advocate of the expedition, if not actually in Ludovico's pay, had certainly been promised much; so that de Vers's advice to his king had been rendered other than disinterested. The more cautious, or less bribed, members of Charles's council seemed on the point of succeeding in pounding good sense into his head; and the vanguard of the army had actually been recalled, when della Rovere arrived in Avignon and immediately hastened to the king's camp. There, according to Guicciardini, the cardinal upbraided the king in a speech "which according to his nature was delivered more with efficacious reasoning and expressive gesture than with ornamental words." Delia Rovere told Charles what a fool he would look in the eyes of Europe were he to draw back now after all his boasting. What had the king to fear? With the contempt of the Italian for the Italian, della Rovere pointed out that his fellow countrymen "being accustomed rather to a show of war than its reality will not have vigor enough to sustain the French fury. What fears, then, what confusions, what dreams have possessed your royal breast? Where is the fierceness with which you boasted, only four days ago, that you would overcome all Italy united?"39