The Borgias

by Paul Strathern

  Alexander VI was now over seventy years old, and despite remaining physically robust, he was beginning to feel his age. Unable to bear the intense summer heat of Rome, on 27 July he departed the city for the cooler climes of Sermoneta, a picturesque hilltop town some twenty miles south of the city. Here he took up residence in the fortress overlooking the surrounding plain. Cesare was away, playing his part in the French invasion of Naples, so Alexander VI took the unprecedented step of leaving in charge of papal affairs in Rome the one person he felt he could trust – namely, his twenty-one-year-old daughter Lucrezia. This act speaks volumes: not only about his trust in his daughter, but also about his belief in her administrative capabilities, as well as her ability to hold her own in a totally male world. This was no rash, isolated decision, swayed by his doting love for his young daughter. It will be remembered that during Alexander VI’s low period in 1498, with Cesare Borgia away in France and the Pope left alone in Rome surrounded by his enemies, he had ordered Lucrezia to retire to Spoleto for her own safety. Yet at the same time, he had appointed her governor of Spoleto and entrusted her with a letter calling upon the local authorities to obey her commands. Although pregnant, Lucrezia had evidently exercised her powers with some accomplishment, despite the fact that she was only eighteen years old. Yet this had involved the administration of a mere province. Now, just three years later, she was being entrusted with handling the papacy itself. According to Burchard:

  The Pope gave her the authority to open all his letters, and told her that if she encountered any problems she was to seek out the advice of Cardinal Jorge da Costa and the other cardinals whom she had the power to assemble if necessary.

  From this, it seems clear that Lucrezia was even granted the power to summon and preside over a consistory. It is worth stressing that this was the formal meeting of the College of Cardinals, which took – or ratified, for the Pope – the most important decisions affecting the Curia, the papal government itself. This was an immense responsibility. Lucrezia Borgia in effect held all the powers of the Pope, to say nothing of the daily running of his office. Fortunately, she was lucky to have the trusted advice of Cardinal da Costa, a remarkable man of immense experience and wisdom. Astonishingly, the Portuguese Cardinal da Costa was by now ninety-four years old,* but remained a sympathetic and understanding figure in full possession of his faculties, as can be seen from the following anecdote retailed by Burchard:

  I do not know the precise nature of the problem, but Lucrezia felt it necessary to seek out Cardinal da Costa, informing him of the advice given her by the Pope, and explaining to him the difficulty on which she needed his advice. Cardinal da Costa was of the opinion that the problem was not serious, and told her, ‘when the Pope discusses an issue in consistory, the vice chancellor, or in his absence the cardinal who has been appointed in his place, takes down the minutes of the meeting and records the way the cardinals present voted. All we really need is for someone to make a note of our conversation.’ Lucrezia informed da Costa that she was quite capable of writing, whereupon the cardinal enquired of her: ‘So where is your pen?’ [In Italian the word penne not only means ‘pen’, but is also vernacular for ‘penis’.] Lucrezia well understood da Costa’s pun and smiled.

  On such evidence, Lucrezia was more than capable of looking after herself in a man’s world. All this would suggest that she was not only emotionally close to her father, but was also aware of his plans, at least in so far as he was willing to reveal these. Indeed, Lucrezia may well have been consulted upon such matters to a greater extent than the frequently absent and increasingly headstrong Cesare. The innocent adolescent Lucrezia, who had slipped away during boring sermons to the choir loft with her young sister-in-law Sancia to tell stories and giggle together, had now become a woman. Despite the trauma of her two broken marriages and the tragic affair with her father’s manservant, she had developed into an adult of considerable intelligence and assurance – a maturity well beyond her years. Furthermore, judging from the paintings in which she appears, with her falling tresses of curled, golden hair, she had become a striking beauty.

  After a month in the country Alexander VI returned to Rome fully revitalized and set back to work with a vengeance. There were several matters to be dealt with, the two most important of which concerned Lucrezia. For a start, there remained the problem of the Infans Romanus, the three-year-old Giovanni Borgia, who had now become fully integrated into the Borgia family. As we have seen, the Pope had previously issued a public bull specifying that Cesare Borgia was the father of this child (whilst he was still a cardinal). It was only now that Alexander VI made public the secret bull legitimizing the Infans Romanus as his own son. But it was also becoming clear that Giulia Farnese had not been the mother of this child, as her relationship with Alexander VI seems to have ended some time before his birth. Indeed, it now emerged that Lucrezia was almost certainly the mother. It had previously been thought that the child born to Lucrezia in seclusion at San Sisto had been stillborn or had died in infancy, but it now became evident that this was not the case. Lucrezia was most likely the mother of the mysterious Infans Romanus, with the father having been Perotto, the Pope’s manservant who had been murdered by Cesare, along with Lucrezia’s maid. Little wonder that Alexander VI had ordered Lucrezia to be confined in the convent of San Sisto. Here she had been able to give birth under circumstances of some secrecy, whereupon the ‘stillborn’ child had been whisked away. However, Alexander VI’s secret bull naming himself as the father of the Infans Romanus, along with the growing rumours that Lucrezia was the mother, would inevitably confirm in the minds of some that Alexander VI and Lucrezia had been involved in an incestuous affair. As far as we can tell, this was certainly not the case, despite their evident closeness. Their habit of affectionately caressing each other in public, after the Spanish fashion, as well as incidents such as the two of them enjoying the sexually charged sight of horses fighting to mount a mare, hardly staunched such rumours. There is no doubting the fact that the Borgias themselves contributed heavily to the scandalous exaggerations which swirled around them, and revelations in Alexander VI’s formerly secret bull can have done nothing but stoke such rumours. On the other hand, much of their actual known behaviour, especially in the case of Cesare, falls little short of the legend already beginning to form around their name.

  We now come to the second matter concerning Alexander VI and Lucrezia. This most clearly of all illustrates the ambiguity of the Pope’s feelings for his daughter. Having let her take charge of the papacy, albeit briefly, he now returned to using her as a mere pawn to further his own aims. For some time Alexander VI had been intent upon securing Cesare’s Romagna state against any possible threat from its powerful northern neighbour Venice. This he now sought to achieve on a more permanent basis by securing a new husband for Lucrezia in the form of Alfonso d’Este, the twenty-four-year-old heir to the Duchy of Ferrara. Despite his age, Alfonso was already a widower, having previously been married to Anna Sforza, the direct descendant of a former duke of Milan. She had died in childbirth four years previously, her timely death breaking the tie between Milan and Ferrara prior to the ousting of the Sforzas and the French takeover of Milan. For several months now Alexander VI had been negotiating with Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, in an attempt to secure the duke’s agreement to a marriage between his son and Lucrezia. Ercole I had been firmly against such a match: the illegitimate (and two times married) daughter of the Pope was hardly the kind of wife he had in mind for his son and heir – whose pedigree through the aristocratic d’Este family linked him to the ruling families of Naples, Spain and formerly Milan. Besides, he had no wish for the d’Este family to form some transient link with the papacy, especially in the form of the notorious Borgia family, whose power and importance would vanish as soon as the seventy-year-old Alexander VI died. Ercole I had plans of his own for his son. Marriage into the French royal family would secure his dukedom against both the power of neighbouring Venice, as wel
l as the rapacious new Duke of Romagna, Cesare Borgia. Louis XII himself appeared to be favourable to a marriage between Alfonso and the aristocratic Mademoiselle de Foix, who was descended from French royalty.

  However, Ercole I soon found himself outwitted by the master tactician Alexander VI. The Pope had already made contact with one of Louis XII’s senior advisors, Cardinal de Rohan, who owed his red hat to Alexander VI. Within no time, Cardinal de Rohan set about persuading Louis XII of the desirability of Lucrezia Borgia as a bride for the young Alfonso. As a result, Louis XII decided to withhold his blessing on any engagement to Mademoiselle de Foix, and instead married her off to the King of Hungary. He suggested to Ercole I that if he was really so set against his son marrying Lucrezia Borgia, he should perhaps demand of the Pope that she bring with her an exorbitant dowry. When Ercole I received the news that Louis XII appeared no longer interested in allowing the d’Estes to marry into French royalty, he is said to have flown into ‘paroxysms of rage’. But he knew that he could not afford to risk upsetting Louis XII by making his real feelings plain.

  Despite this setback, Ercole I was determined to rebuff Alexander VI’s designs upon his son, and chose to follow Louis XII’s advice to the best of his ability. Even Alexander VI was taken aback by the enormity of Ercole I’s demands for Lucrezia’s dowry, commenting that the aristocratic duke ‘bargained like a tradesman’. Whereupon Ercole I was forced to defend himself against the accusation that he was making ‘importunate demands’ upon the Pope. Alexander VI refused to be put off and eventually a dowry was agreed. This consisted of ‘100,000 ducats in cash, plus . . . an annual income amounting to some 3,000 ducats’. On top of this the Pope would reduce the tax which was paid to the Pope by the Duchy of Ferrara (this territory being nominally part of the ancient Papal States) from an annual 4,500 ducats to a nominal 100 ducats. Alexander VI accepted these inflated terms. Even so, Ercole I insisted that it was only his wish to remain on good terms with Louis XII, as well as the Pope and his dangerous son Cesare Borgia, that made him ‘condescend to such an unequal relationship’. Cesare certainly played a significant role in these negotiations, not least by providing the go-between who conveyed the messages back and forth between Rome and Ferrara. The messenger concerned was the Spanish hardman Ramiro de Lorqua, Cesare’s most trusted commander, who had been given the task of governing Cesare’s Romagna territory during his absence.

  These horse-trading negotiations dragged on throughout the early months of 1501. They would not come to a peak until August of that year, the very time when Alexander VI was out of Rome and had given Lucrezia ‘authority to open all his letters’. This time there can be no doubt that Lucrezia, far from being a mere instrument in the foreign policy of her father and her brother Cesare, took an active role in deciding her own fate.

  The accomplished and level-headed Lucrezia saw this as her opportunity. Maybe at last she could put behind her the wreckage of her personal life of broken teenage engagements, disastrous love affairs* and her two previous marriages. On top of all this, her one close female friend, her sister-in-law the adventurous Sancia of Aragon, had now become politically and personally non grata in the Vatican. Following her lover Cesare’s marriage to the French Charlotte d’Albret, and Alexander VI’s reversal of his policy towards Naples, the Pope had ordered Sancia’s confinement in the Castel Sant’Angelo. No, Lucrezia realized, if she were to marry Alfonso d’Este she could perhaps make a life of her own in Ferrara, far from the overbearing influence of her father and her possessive brother. According to all reports, Alfonso d’Este was not a particularly prepossessing catch – but it seemed he was also not a strong-willed man and appeared to have little interest in anything other than pursuing his own pleasures. The challenge of creating a life of her own under such circumstances, with the prospect of eventually becoming Duchess of Ferrara, appealed to the new Lucrezia, who had by now learned enough from the example set by her father and her elder brother to be confident of achieving whatever she set her mind upon. Though unlike them, she was of course a woman and would have to employ her charm, and disguise her determination, in order to achieve whatever schemes she had in mind. She was, by now, undoubtedly a Borgia.

  As the negotiations over Lucrezia’s dowry gradually edged towards a successful conclusion, her behaviour underwent a distinct change. She now set aside her mourning for her husband Alfonso, Duke of Biseglie, whose murder had taken place a year previously, and in August the Mantuan ambassador reported:

  Up to now Donna Lucretia, according to the Spanish usage has eaten from earthenware and maiolica. Now she has begun to eat from silver as she is almost no longer a widow.

  Lucrezia Borgia’s betrothal to Alfonso d’Este was announced on Saturday, 4 September 1501 ‘around the time of Vespers’ (i.e. late afternoon). This was celebrated by the firing of cannon salvoes from the high walls of Castel Sant’Angelo ‘without ceasing from Vespers to nightfall’. However, the future bride and groom remained in their separate cities, not expected to meet until the time of the actual wedding ceremony, which, in accordance with contemporary practice, would be held in the bridegroom’s home city. Next day, Lucrezia Borgia rode in procession, accompanied by four bishops and a detachment of some thirty horsemen, while the great bell of the Capitol was rung, and many fires and beacons were lit on the Castel Sant’Angelo and all over the city. This was probably more a reflection of the Pope’s exuberant happiness, than that of his daughter – who was nonetheless pleased, after her own fashion.

  On 25 September Cesare Borgia arrived back in Rome from the successful French war against Naples. He was said to be exhausted after the campaign and at once retired to bed. There were conflicting reports: the Ferrarese ambassador wrote, ‘I thought he was ill, but yesterday evening he danced without intermission and will do so again tonight at the Pope’s palace where the illustrious Duchess [Lucrezia] is going to supper.’ An entry from Burchard’s Journal is more illuminating:

  The Duke [Cesare] has recently been ill again with his old complaint, which returned upon him after the conquest of Naples and has, some of his physicians think, affected his mind as well as his body. Although forcing himself to take part in dances and entertainments, it is seen and reported by his servants that they discover him exhausted and sometimes in pain upon his bed.

  On 25 September Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia travelled north of Rome to Civita Castellana for a week-long inspection of the fortresses in this region, which they had ‘acquired’, along with the estates formerly belonging to the aristocratic Caetani family. As before, Lucrezia would be left in charge in Rome. The same would happen when the Pope and his son left Rome on 17 October for another week-long inspection of the fortresses they had seized from the Savelli and Colonna families, some of which were being significantly reinforced. It had also been decided by Alexander VI that the Orsini family should be rewarded with a number of these estates for their loyalty to the Borgia family, especially to Cesare on his previous campaigns in the Romagna. The Pope and his son were ensuring that all territory surrounding Rome remained firmly under their control. There was to be no repeat of the insubordination shown to the Pope by his autocratic enemies after Charles VIII had returned to France – when the Colonna had occupied Ostia and the castles outside Rome owned by the aristocratic families had continued to fly the French flag. Admittedly, the powerful Orsini had played a leading role in these affronts to papal authority. But now that they had demonstrated their loyalty, at least for the time being, it was only right (and strategically useful) that they should be rewarded for this. With the long-established aristocratic families thus divided, they could no longer use their combined powers to curb the influence of the papacy, as had previously been the case. At the same time, Alexander VI’s possession of the territory and castles north of Rome meant that the direct route through the Apennines to the Romagna remained firmly under the control of the Papal Forces.

  As was customary, all military activity had halted for the winter. There were
good practical reasons for this. The Apennines, in particular, were rendered impassable to large contingents of soldiers, cavalry and artillery when the passes were clogged with mud and snow. Even so, Cesare Borgia was already making plans to launch a third campaign in the Romagna with the intention of securing the entire territory for himself. All Italy was aware of this. But the question remained as to whether the territorial ambitions harboured by himself and his father would remain limited to the Romagna.

  In preparation for Lucrezia Borgia’s wedding, Ercole I of Ferrara despatched a request to Rome for a copy of the Borgia family tree, so that this could be exhibited in his palace and added to his own tree of distinguished ancestors. The d’Este family had considerable pretensions in this field. They were related to both Neapolitan and Spanish royalty (Aragon branch), as well as the Dukes of Milan (Sforzas) and the Gonzaga dynasty (rulers of nearby Mantua). Such were the pretentions of Ercole I that he even went so far as to imitate the Roman emperors on his Ferrarese coinage, having himself styled as divus (‘deified one’). As we have seen, Alexander VI was also interested in forming links with distinguished rulers, but only in the present, and for present gain. The past was now of little interest, and the dubious Borja claim to be descended from royalty, in the form of Ramiro I, appears to have been overlooked on this occasion. In reply to Ercole I’s request for a Borgia family tree, a spurious genealogy was quickly concocted showing the Borgias as descendants of Don Pedro of Atares, the feudal lord of Borja and pretender to the throne of Aragon. Whereas the Borgia claim to be descended from King Ramiro I of Aragon was dubious, their claim to be descended from Don Pedro was patently false, as this particular scion of the House of Aragon had died without producing any offspring.