Yet there now followed another twist in the plot, which further complicated Alexander VI’s position. News reached Rome that in northern Italy the French were assembling an army to march south and relieve their forces, which were under siege at Gaeta, before launching a campaign to drive the Spanish out of Naples altogether. Alexander VI was once more faced with the prospect of having to rethink his policy towards Naples. However, by now Alexander VI was so deeply committed to the Spanish cause that he was allowing the Spanish to recruit mercenary soldiers in Rome itself. But all those years spent dealing, and double-dealing, with papal affairs during his time as vice-chancellor now came into their own. Only the most practised of diplomats would have undertaken the moves now made by Alexander VI, in consultation with his son Cesare, who himself by this stage required little education in the art of deception.
Alexander VI covertly made contact with the French, promising to instruct Cesare Borgia and his Romagna army to join forces with the French on their march south. Borgia’s force would be a considerable boost, as he was now so confident of his popularity in the Romagna that he could afford to withdraw almost all of his garrisons from the newly expanded Papal States. In return for this force, Alexander VI proposed that his son Cesare should be allowed to rule Naples. This was not such an outrageous suggestion as it might appear. After all, the Pope indicated, it was surely better to have this troublesome kingdom ruled by a reliable ally, rather than having the French army constantly overstretched in the attempt to maintain French rule in southern Italy.
As if this triple-dealing was not enough, Alexander VI now showed his true colours by opening undercover negotiations with the Venetians. He suggested to his new ‘partner’ that if the Spanish were driven out of Naples, this was surely the time for the Papal Army to join forces with Venice and drive the French from Milan. Then, once again, the Italian peninsula would be rid of foreign interference.
It takes little imagination to see that it would be but a short step from here to a united Italy, with the Pope himself as the presiding figure. And this was precisely what Alexander VI had in mind. Step by step the new Roman Empire would come into being.
During the early summer Cesare Borgia began reinforcing his army in Rome. Such was his popularity in the Romagna that many mercenaries from the region soon flocked to join his colours. By mid-summer Borgia had assembled a force of 600 cavalry, 4,000 battle-hardened foot soldiers and the prospect of more to come. In contrast to Borgia’s previous forces, this was very much his own army, all swearing allegiance to the Captain-General of the Papal Forces. Its members were outfitted in the Borgia colours of quartered red and yellow, emblazoned with the name ‘César’. This was more than just a vainglorious echo of the imperial Roman past. Backed by Alexander VI’s extensive papal funds, it could afford to recruit the finest fighting men available in neighbouring European countries: Swiss mercenaries, Spanish soldiers, and even the much-feared Stradiots, Balkan mercenaries who had withstood the Ottomans.
There followed yet another snag. It soon became clear that the French army being assembled in Milan would take some time to arrive. By which stage, the Spanish may well have overrun Gaeta. Having placed himself in a position where he now faced a number of decisive diplomatic options, Alexander VI found it impossible to withdraw from the hot and increasingly hazardous summer climate of Rome. The summer of 1503 would prove even more hot and calamitous than usual in the Holy City. The tolling midday church bells would ring out over the silent, deserted streets of the heat-stunned city. Yet just a few hours later, as the shadows lengthened and the comparative coolness of dusk began, the city would be invaded by malaria-bearing mosquitoes from the Pontine Marshes to the south, as well as those which had colonized the stagnant pools in the all but dry riverbed of the Tiber.
The death toll in the fetid slums of the city always rose during the long stifling summer months, but this year it became exceptionally high. So much so that rumours were soon spreading of an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city. Alexander VI did his best to isolate Trastevere and the Vatican, but still the deaths continued to spread, with all classes being affected. On 1 August news reached Alexander VI that his nephew Cardinal Juan Borgia-Lanjol, one of the first ‘nephew-cardinals’ he had appointed in the early months of his reign as pope, had died. Rumours that he had been poisoned by enemies of the Borgia soon began to spread, but Alexander VI discounted them. Cardinal Borgia-Lanjol had been notorious for his gluttony, and by time of his demise at fifty-seven years old, he had become massively overweight. Alexander VI, conscious of his own somewhat expanded figure, could not help but remark as he stood at the window in the Vatican, watching his nephew’s coffin pass: ‘This month is a bad one for fat people.’ Now more than ever, the superstitious Alexander VI was conscious of the fact that no less than four of his recent predecessors on the papal throne had died in Rome during the height of summer. As the Pope continued to watch his nephew’s funeral procession pass across the piazza below, an owl suddenly flew in through the open window and fell dead at his feet. Whereupon Alexander VI’s face paled and he cried out: ‘This is an evil, evil omen!’ Then he ran from the room.
Yet even during this perilous time of rapidly shifting political fortunes Alexander VI did receive one piece of news which he celebrated with unalloyed joy. Some time around midsummer he learned that he had fathered yet another illegitimate son, by a Roman woman whose identity remains unknown. The infant was christened Rodrigo, after his illustrious father. Meanwhile, his oldest surviving son Cesare continued to behave in his own inimitable fashion. Seemingly unconcerned by the growing diplomatic and other troubles facing his father, Cesare set out at first light each morning, riding into the cool misty countryside to go boar-hunting. Only after several hours hard riding would he return before the heat of the day set in, whereupon he would take to his bed in his apartment.
During the first week of August, Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia were invited by the Venetian Cardinal Adriano da Corneto to a party to celebrate his recent elevation to the rank of cardinal. The party took place during the cooler hours of the late afternoon and was held at the cardinal’s sumptuous villa, set amidst hillside vineyards on the northern outskirts of Rome. It was attended by a number of senior clergy. Six days later the normally robust Alexander VI was stricken down by a mysterious illness and spent all that evening vomiting. The following day Cesare Borgia, who was planning to join his troops assembling at Perugia, was also laid low with a similar violent illness. Despite intense precautions, including sealing off the Vatican, news soon leaked out that Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia had both been poisoned.
According to these rumours, the Pope and his son had attended Cardinal da Corneto’s party with the intention of poisoning their wealthy host and confiscating his possessions. Such funds were apparently needed to maintain Cesare Borgia’s forces, and the poisoning would have echoed the recent poisoning of Cardinal Michiel for similar purposes. A servant had been bribed to administer the poison, which was known as ‘cantarella’. This was the Borgia’s own favoured poison and came in the form of a white powder with a pleasant, sugary taste. The precise ingredients of this ‘eternity powder’ remain unknown, but it was almost certainly an arsenic preparation. According to the contemporary historian Paolo Giovio, cantarella was a ‘time poison’ whose efficacy depended upon the strength of the mixture: ‘It did not overwhelm the vital forces in the manner of the active venoms by sudden and energetic action but by insensibly penetrating the veins it slowly worked with mortal effect.’
Seemingly Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia had made the fatal error (or possibly been tricked into the mistake) of drinking the wine intended for Cardinal da Corneto. In the opinion of many, the delayed action of the poison on both the Pope and his son confirmed that it was cantarella. As the rumours of what had taken place spread beyond Rome, it soon became clear that Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia were both on their deathbeds.
________________
*Here we can se
e in embryo Machiavelli’s idea concerning ‘Virtù e Fortuna’, which he would develop to such notorious effect in The Prince. Despite his years of diplomatic experience, this was the first time he had witnessed first-hand the workings of raw power in action – and he would never forget it, or its place in realpolitik.
*By now Cardinal Orsini was seriously ill, and within a matter of weeks he would be dead, slowly poisoned on orders from Alexander VI.
*A small town some twenty miles south-east of Siena.
CHAPTER 18
LUCREZIA IN FERRARA
IMMEDIATELY THE NEWS of what had taken place in Rome arrived in Ferrara. It was broken to the twenty-three-year-old Lucrezia Borgia by Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, the younger brother of her husband Alfonso. When the poet Pietro Bembo called to offer his condolences, he found Lucrezia inconsolable, prostrated with grief. He wrote to her two days later:
As soon as I saw you lying there in that darkened room and in that black gown, so tearful and disconsolate, my feelings overwhelmed me and for a long time I stood there unable to utter a word, not knowing even what to say. Instead of offering sympathy, I felt in need of offering sympathy to myself. I left, fumbling and speechless, overcome with emotion at the sight of your misery.
Despite his deep, empathetic emotions, Bembo could not refrain from adding some level-headed advice: ‘This is not the first misfortune which you have had to endure at the hands of your cruel and malign destiny . . . You would do well not to allow anyone to assume, as some might be led to infer in present circumstances, that you bewail not so much your loss but what may betide your present fortunes.’
Should her father and her brother die, Lucrezia would be left without support, her position diminished, at the mercy of the enemies of the Borgia family, as well as the enemies she herself had made at Ferrara and amongst the d’Este family. As we have seen, from the outset Lucrezia was resented by her haughty older sister-in-law Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua. For Isabella, the sight of the upstart Lucrezia, illegitimate and Spanish to boot, living in the very apartments once occupied by her beloved mother, the deceased Eleanora, Duchess of Ferrara, was difficult enough.* The thought that Lucrezia would one day assume her mother’s title was all but unbearable to her. Although in Lucrezia’s presence she went out of her way to appear formally courteous, when Isabella returned to Mantua she received long, almost daily letters from her spy at the Ferrara court, describing in meticulous detail Lucrezia’s life. We now know that this spy was Bernardo di Prosperi, who worked in the chancellery and was thus ideally placed to recount all the latest court gossip, which he poured into ‘letters, running into thousands’.
Lucrezia remained resentful of her high-minded father-in-law Duke Ercole I for curbing what he saw as her extravagant ways, as well as sending back to Rome so many of her Spanish attendants. Though the court records show that Lucrezia still retained a considerable number of attendants with Spanish-sounding names. Despite this, she continued to feel lonely – away from Rome, married to a barely compatible husband, and living under the constant shadow of the revered dead Duchess Eleanora.
Even so, Ferrara had its consolations for Lucrezia. Under Ercole I, especially during his earlier years when he had been married to the formidable Eleanora, the city of Ferrara had blossomed into a centre of Renaissance culture, a reputation which it still retained when Lucrezia arrived. Ercole I had laid out a planned city of wide paved streets, whose straight vistas replaced the winding alleyways of the ancient medieval city. And amongst the new palazzi and piazzi he even built the Sala nova delle Commedie, claimed as ‘the first purpose-built hall for the performance of plays’ since classical times. Consequently, all manner of artists, thinkers, musicians and poets had been drawn to the Ferrarese court.
Lucrezia had always been keen on music and poetry, and soon made friends with Ercole Strozzi, an accomplished poet who was a member of the wealthy Florentine banking family which had been exiled by the Medici. The thirty-year-old Strozzi was clearly attracted by Lucrezia, and when he made the seventy-mile visit to Venice he would invariably return with rolls of her favourite colourful expensive fabrics. Lucrezia quickly had these made up into the latest fashionable garments, in which she delighted to appear at court, along with her similarly attired attendants – as was duly noted by the ever-observant Bernardo di Prosperi. Strozzi would even dedicate one of his finest poems, ‘La Caccia’ (‘The Hunt’), to Lucrezia, in recognition of how much she enjoyed watching the hunts which took place in the large walled hunting park which Ercole I had enclosed beside one of his refurbished ducal palaces. Lucrezia was fond of Strozzi, but not physically attracted to this club-footed figure who was forced to hobble about the city on crutches.
In the summer she took to travelling down the River Po in her brightly painted barge to visit Strozzi in his lagoon-side Renaissance villa at Ostellato, some fifteen miles west of Ferrara. As ever, she was wont to make a characteristically spectacular entrance. Her Italian biographer Maria Bellonci described her:
She was now twenty-three, remember, and was wearing cloth of gold and emeralds and pearls; her hair was fine and fair, and she was accompanied by her suite of women, girls-in-waiting, clowns and drummers.
It was here at the Strozzi villa that Lucrezia encountered the Venetian Pietro Bembo, who was already gaining renown as a humanist scholar and one of the finest poets of his age. Bembo was ten years older than Lucrezia, and had long straight dark hair, which encompassed his sensitive, almost effeminate features. The chemistry between them appears to have been immediate and they soon became lovers. Of necessity, this was a highly discreet affair, whose true nature can only be gleaned obliquely from the frequent tender letters between them. Not for nothing have these been called ‘The Prettiest Love Letters in the World’. Even so, it is difficult to assess the precise nature of the undeniable love between Lucrezia and her ‘Messer Pietro mio’ (‘My Master Pietro’).
At the time, Bembo was – in the manner of Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura, during previous centuries – cultivating the notion of an intense platonic love, as distinct from actual physical love. However, there are indications that this might not have been the case with Lucrezia. She may well have been the younger of the two, but she was certainly the most experienced in the realities of love, no matter how perilous the repercussions. Bembo sent her some of his loveliest sonnets:
Those beautiful tresses the more I love them,
The much more harm they do to me.
Unloose the knot that ties them,
Release the gold of all I crave to see . . .
Lucrezia, who knew that her poetic talent could never match his, chose to copy out for him some lines by the fifteenth-century Aragonese poet Lope de Estúñiga:
I think that should I die,
And my desire die with me,
Such great love would end
The world would be bereft of love . . .
They exchanged poems and letters, as well as mementoes. The last included a medallion with Lucrezia’s profile, and a curly lock of her long golden hair. In this correspondence, perhaps more than anywhere, we hear the true voice of Lucrezia. When Bembo wrote to her, comparing his heart to a crystal ball in which he read his feelings for her, she replied: ‘Messer Pietro mio . . . Your, or our joint, crystal as it should be called . . . I cannot think what to say, or imagine, so much is their identity, as great as any through all of time.’ She ends by telling him ‘from now on, call me f.f ’. A nickname? A secret lover’s name? A code even? Some of her letters were written in Spanish, apparently ‘for reasons of semi-secrecy’. When the affair began, her husband Alfonso was travelling abroad on one of the regular tours he undertook inspecting the fortifications of various cities. These would on occasion take him as far away as Paris, and once even to London, where he met Henry VII. Yet his loyal informants kept him abreast of the latest news and gossip from the court at Ferrara.
In one letter to Lucrezia, Bembo records words they had
spoken together ‘on the balcony with the moon as witness’. Earlier, during the stifling summer weather, he wrote suggestively, ‘Here the heat is unusually intense,’ and asked if she felt the same. Inevitably it seems that suspicions were aroused. Bellonci suggests that Alfonso’s informants told him of ‘too many kisses’ – although in his letters Bembo takes care to mention only his burning desire to kiss her hand.
When Alfonso and his retinue unexpectedly arrived at Ostellato, ostensibly for some hunting, Bembo quickly disappeared back to Venice. But he would soon return and make contact with Lucrezia. These comings and goings, dated letters and so forth, are recorded fact. But Bellonci’s gloss on the truth would appear to be a little too romantic. Had Alfonso any firm suspicions? If so, Bembo would in all likelihood have disappeared more permanently, to Venice or elsewhere. Such affairs were not taken lightly by cuckolded husbands. Some years later, Ercole Strozzi’s amorous exploits in Ferrara would lead to him being discovered early one morning ‘with twenty-two stab wounds in his body and his hair pulled out’.
Then in August the news reached Lucrezia of the poisoning of her father and her beloved brother Cesare, which left her prostrated with grief. Some time later it was confirmed that her father had died, but that Cesare remained alive. However, he was so ill that he was not expected to survive.
It soon transpired how right Bembo had been to advise Lucrezia to restrain her grief and look to her own future. Now that the Pope was dead, her link to any central power had also died. And without support from Cesare she was left completely on her own. Indeed, her position was far more precarious than she realized. Her father-in-law Duke Ercole I pointedly did not visit her to console her in her grief. Instead, he wrote to his envoy in Milan, asking him to convey to the French that the Pope’s death was ‘in no way displeasing to us’. It was not long before Louis XII revealed a similar attitude, with the Ferrarese envoy reporting from the French king’s court that Louis XII had personally told him: ‘I well know that you were never content with this marriage,’ going so far as to say ‘that Madonna Lucretia [sic] was not the true wife of Alfonso’. This insinuation was based on the fact that Lucrezia’s divorce from Giovanni Sforza on grounds of impotence had been a farce. Yet perhaps the most important factor of all which contributed to the insecurity of her position was that she had not yet produced an heir.
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