Alexander’s children were the instruments and beneficiaries of his policies. No stigma was attached to bastardy at the time; bastards being sometimes preferred over legitimate children. Nepotism among Renaissance popes was nothing new. It was taken as normal by Italians of the time that each pope, as soon as he was elected, would in the usually comparatively short time available to him take steps to advance his relations to positions of power and wealth and, if possible, to establish a dynasty on a permanent basis. Calixtus himself, who led a blameless private life, had been guilty of excessive nepotism. Alexander, however, was unique in the lengths to which he would go, and in the ambition, talent and looks of the children he promoted. Sexual laxity in the princes of the Church, and indeed in lay society, was taken as a matter of course and it was not until the kings and princes felt their interests threatened by Alexander’s political proceedings that the torrent of abuse against him began. At the time, however, Rodrigo Borgia’s election was generally welcomed. No one beyond the pious Queen Isabella of Castile objected to his immoral way of life as unsuited to the occupant of the Chair of St Peter. Indeed, when the Queen later remonstrated with the papal nuncio Desprats (another Catalan) about Alexander’s flaunting of his children, Desprats retorted that the Queen had clearly not studied the lives of Alexander’s predecessors such as Innocent VIII and Sixtus IV, and that if she had she would not have complained about his present Holiness. ‘And I revealed to her some things about Pope Sixtus and Pope Innocent, demonstrating how much more worthily Your Holiness behaved than the aforesaid [pontiffs]’, he wrote disingenuously to his patron, Alexander.10
Lucrezia’s immediate future was inextricably linked with her father’s dynastic plan for his family and influenced by the shifts in his political alliances. Before his election to the papacy, Alexander had concentrated on building a power base in his native Valencia with rich benefices for himself and his children, not to mention the dukedom of Gandia and other secular privileges as the fruits of his complex relationship with the Catholic Kings of Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. The Borgias originated in Aragon but for several hundred years had lived in the territory of the former Moorish kingdom of Valencia. The social ascent of the family from the obscure ranks of the small landowning class of citizens had begun in the fourteenth century, accelerating in the time of Calixtus when his niece, Rodrigo’s sister Joana, married a member of the ancient nobility Their spectacular rise to prominence during the fifteenth century owed itself to the efforts of first Calixtus (who had four sisters and numerous relations living there) and then to Alexander as cardinal and as Pope. Their ascent to the ranks of the high nobility was confirmed when Rodrigo obtained the dukedom of Gandia for his eldest son, Pedro Luis, in 1485. This honour, and the lands which went with it, for which the then Cardinal Borgia paid handsomely and subsequently enlarged, was the foundation stone of the Borja dynasty in Spain. In keeping with their customary position of bargaining between King Ferdinand of Aragon and Rodrigo as one Catalan to another, it seems likely that the dukedom was the reward Rodrigo extracted for his services in influencing the then Pope, Sixtus IV, to grant a Bull of dispensation in 1471 enabling Ferdinand to marry Isabella, thus uniting the Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Pedro Luis, whom Rodrigo had named guardian to Juan, died unmarried and without heirs in Rodrigo’s palace in Rome in 1488, leaving his titles and Spanish estates to Juan, who also inherited his fiancée, Maria Enriques, cousin to King Ferdinand.
Lucrezia, eight years old at the time, was left 10,000 ducats by the half-brother whom she had barely known. As her father continued to exploit his Spanish connections, she was promised in marriage, aged ten, to Querubi de Centelles, son of the Count of Oliva, on 26 February 1491, when she was described in the agreement between Borgia and Oliva as ‘carnal daughter of the said most reverend cardinal and sister of the most illustrious lord Don Juan de Borja, Duke of Gandia’. Within just over two months her father, after her proposed bridegroom married someone else, betrothed her, now aged just eleven, on 30 April 1491, to Don Gaspar de Procida, son of the Count of Almenara and Aversa. This marriage contract too was annulled on 8 November 1492, after Rodrigo’s election, when the new Pope no longer saw his daughter’s future in Spain. As Alexander trod the difficult path endeavouring to preserve the independence of the papacy between conflicting interests, Lucrezia would be the victim of his shifting pattern of alliances.
2. Countess of Pesaro
‘The Pope being a carnal man and very loving of his flesh and blood, this [relationship] will so establish the love of His Beatitude towards our house that no one will have the opportunity to divert him from us and draw him towards themselves’
– Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, to his brother Ludovico, Duke of Milan, on the marriage of Lucrezia to Giovanni Sforza, 3 February 1493
Alexander’s election had been unanimous; neither of his two most powerful rivals, cardinals Giuliano della Rovere (the future Pope Julius II), representing the interest of the Kingdom of Naples, nor Ascanio Sforza, representing the Duchy of Milan, could gain a majority Ascanio Sforza, seeing which way the wind was blowing, had swung his partisans behind Rodrigo and in return had received Borgia’s former office, the Vice-Chancellorship, his palace and various strongholds and benefices in his gift. The usual accusations of simony – the selling of holy offices for money – were raised: the diarist Stefano Infessura wrote that a train-load of mules laden with silver had been seen passing from Borgia’s palace to Sforza’s, but nothing could be proven beyond the usual wheeling and dealing which attended papal elections. Analysing the voting records of the conclave which resulted in Alexander’s election, the Borgias’ most authoritative historian, Michael Mallett, considered that Alexander won on merit.
Alexander VI was seen as an able ‘chief executive’ who could lead the Church through increasingly dangerous times. Even the Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini, no friend of the Borgias, admitted his capabilities: ‘Alexander VI possessed singular cunning and sagacity, excellent judgement, a marvellous efficacy in persuading, and an incredible dexterity and attentiveness in dealing with weighty matters’, he wrote. (These qualities, however, he added, were ‘far outweighed by his vices: the most obscene behaviour, insincerity, shamelessness, lying, faithlessness, impiety, insatiable avarice, immoderate ambition, a cruelty more barbaric and a most ardent cupidity to exalt his numerous children: and among these were several (in order that depraved instruments might not be lacking to carry out his depraved designs) no less detestable than the father . . .)I
Lucrezia’s third betrothal and later marriage to Giovanni Sforza, lord of Pesaro, signed on 2 February 1493 and executed by proxy while Sforza was in Pesaro, demonstrated the complete ruthlessness with which Alexander deployed his daughter, still a child even by the standards of the day It was simply a cynical and temporary response to a temporary situation: by marrying his daughter to a connection of Ascanio Sforza he was not only demonstrating publicly his debt of gratitude for his election but punishing the Sforzas’ enemy, Ferrante, the Aragonese King of Naples, for a hostile move against himself the previous September. In the complex minuet – even tit for tat – of Italian high politics, King Ferrante of Naples, angered by Alexander’s alliance with Ascanio, had financially backed a move by the Orsini family in September 1492 to buy the castles of Cerveteri and Anguillara near Rome in an attempt to put a stranglehold on the Pope in the first weeks of his papacy In the month before Lucrezia’s betrothal Alexander had negotiated a new line-up of Italian powers with the League of St Mark linking the papacy to Venice and Milan. The child bride Lucrezia was to be a pledge to the Sforzas and a signal to the powers beyond Rome of Alexander’s independence. A letter from Ascanio Sforza to his brother Ludovico, announcing the signing of the contract and proxy ceremony the previous night, made clear the importance the Sforzas attached to the marriage: ‘The Pope being a carnal man and very loving of his flesh and blood, this [relationship] will so establish the love of His Beatitude towa
rds our house that no one will have the opportunity to divert him from us and draw him towards themselves.’2 The envoys of the King of Naples, he told Ludovico, had gone to infinite pains in recent days to prevent the Sforza marriage, offering instead as a husband for Lucrezia the son of the Duke of Calabria, Ferrante’s grandson (who later became Lucrezia’s second husband) with great material inducements. To circumvent the Neapolitan efforts, the proxy ceremony was carried out in the greatest secrecy at the Pope’s request – only the Cardinal of Monreale, Cesare, Juan, Ascanio, the Milanese ambassador, Stefano Taberna, four of the Pope’s chamberlains and the notary who drew up the contract were party to the affair. Giovanni Sforza was to be given a condotta (a military contract to raise and pay a specified number of troops to the profit of the provider, or condottiere) by the Pope subsidized by the Duke of Milan.3 Lucrezia brought with her a dowry of 31,000 ducats.
In dynastic terms of prestige and wealth it was not a great marriage. Giovanni Sforza was a minor prince, the illegitimate son of Costanzo Sforza, Count of Cotignola, the original but far less powerful line of the family to which Ludovico il Moro and Ascanio belonged. Pesaro, a beautiful town on the Adriatic coast of Italy, strategically situated on the Via Emilia, had only been taken over by Giovanni’s grandfather, Alessandro, in 1445. Alessandro-a ruthless husband who had twice tried to poison, and then to strangle his second wife, before forcing her into a convent – was otherwise a civilized man who employed the best architects and artists to beautify the town. The court at Pesaro was famous for its festivities: Alessandro expanded his connections with all the great families of Italy and founded a superb library His son Costanzo, Giovanni’s father, a cousin of Ascanio Sforza, made his court a centre for poets and scholars, and married into the Aragonese royal family; his bride was Camilla d’Aragona, niece of King Ferrante. But the marriage produced no legitimate heirs, so Giovanni, the eldest of two illegitimate sons, succeeded as lord in 1483. He enjoyed an annual revenue of 12,000 ducats but, like many lords with a court to maintain, was perennially short of money and earned his living as a condottiere. Giovanni Sforza was handsome and well-connected, not only through his Sforza relations in Milan, but his first wife, Maddalena Gonzaga, had been the sister of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, and of Elisabetta, wife of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. He was, however, utterly dependent on his powerful Sforza relations, Ascanio and Ludovico, and had as little choice in the marriage as Lucrezia; he did what the elder Sforzas told him and was destined to play only a fleeting part in Lucrezia’s life.
The Sforza marriage took place under the veils of secrecy and dissimulation customary in Alexander’s manoeuvres. As early as 4 November 1492, the Mantuan envoy Jacopo d’Atri reported that Giovanni Sforza was staying secretly in the house of the Cardinal of San Clemente, and that the negotiations for his marriage to Lucrezia were far advanced. Secrecy was necessary because Lucrezia’s previous fiance, Procida, had come to Rome to claim his bride, declaring that his marriage had been negotiated by means of the King of Spain. ‘is much gossip about Pesaro’s marriage,’ the Ferrarese envoy wrote to his master, Duke Ercole d’Este. ‘The first bridegroom is still here, raising a great hue and cry, as a Catalan. . .’4 By a curious twist of fate the man who was to become Lucrezia’s third husband, Alfonso d’Este, son of Duke Ercole, was a guest in the Vatican at the time and visited Lucrezia.5 Procida eventually accepted defeat, compensated by a considerable sum of money in the form of a condotta from the Pope, subsidized by the Duke of Milan, in order to buy his silence and give way to Giovanni Sforza.6 At any rate he was registered as among the leading members of Juan Gandia’s household in Valencia the following year.7
Lucrezia’s marriage to Giovanni Sforza was celebrated with due pomp and festivity in the Vatican on 12 June 1493. Sforza had made a solemn entry into Rome two days earlier, having returned to Pesaro in the interim. The timing of his arrival and indeed of his marriage had been delayed, dictated by Ascanio Sforza’s need to seek the advice of his astrologers as to the most favourable date, which irritated the Pope. As it turned out, the astrologers’ choice of date made no difference to what was to be an ill-starred marriage. Lucrezia saw her husband-to-be for the first time when he arrived outside the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico to pay his respects to her from a distance. He must have seemed old to her – he was twenty-six and a widower – although he was handsome enough with a long, straight nose, a fashionable beard and flowing hair. Lucrezia was only just thirteen but no innocent, given the close proximity in which she lived with her father’s teenage mistress, Giulia Farnese.
The Pope spared no expense to show off his daughter, endowing her with a sumptuous trousseau which was rumoured to include a dress reputedly worth 15,000 ducats.8 Giovanni himself had borrowed jewellery from the Gonzaga to put on a good show, and was dressed for his wedding in a long Turkish-style robe of curled cloth of gold, with the Gonzaga gold chain round his neck. At the Pope’s orders he was accompanied to the Vatican by the Roman barons and a flock of bishops to a great hall crowded with the noblewomen of Rome. Cesare and Juan Gandia slipped in through a secret door, the younger Borgia dressed with his usual ostentation, in a ‘Turcha’, like the bridegroom’s, of curled cloth of gold down to the floor, his sleeves embroidered with large pearls, a chain of balas rubies and pearls of great price at his neck and wearing a beret studded with a jewel estimated to be worth 150,000 ducats.
The bride herself was described by one observer as ‘very beautiful’ (‘assai bella’), in a splendid dress and jewels. She was flanked by the daughter of Niccolὸ Orsini, Count of Pitigliano, married to Giulia Farnese’s brother, Angelo, and by Giulia herself, who quite outshone her and was described by an onlooker as ‘truly beautiful to behold and said to be the Pope’s favourite’. The bride and groom knelt at the Pope’s feet while the Count of Pitigliano held a naked sword above them and an archbishop pronounced the marriage ceremony Afterwards the Pope led them into an outer room where a ‘very polished’ pastoral eclogue by Serafino was performed, followed by Plautus’s comedy The Menaechmi, in Latin, which bored Alexander who ordered it to be cut short. There was a lavish presentation of wedding presents in the form of magnificent silver from, among others, Cesare, Ascanio and the Duke of Ferrara.9 After a light collation the couple were accompanied to the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico by all the barons, prelates and ladies, and that night the Pope gave a ‘most sumptuous’ private dinner for the gentlemen at which Ascanio Sforza and his Milanese ally, Cardinal Sanseverino, were prominent guests.10 There was to be no bedding of the bride as was customary since the Pope had ordered that the marriage was not to be consummated before November, either out of consideration for his daughter’s age or, equally likely, to enable him to have it dissolved on the grounds of non-consummation in case it no longer suited his plans.
Within a week of Lucrezia’s marriage to Sforza, the wily Alexander was hedging his diplomatic bets. Don Diego Lopez de Haro, envoy extraordinary from the King and Queen of Spain, came to offer the Pope homage on their behalf. It was the first prong of a pincer movement designed to draw Alexander back towards the Aragonese cause in Naples. Lopez de Haro advised Alexander that King Ferdinand ‘regarded the affairs of Naples as his own’ while proffering an irresistible bait: the revival of the marriage project between the Borgias and the royal family of Aragon which had been planned before the death of Pedro Luis. Juan Gandia had taken his late half-brother’s place as the fiance of Dona Maria Enriques, the King’s cousin. Alexander leapt hungrily at the lure, hoping, as he told his son Juan, not only for the royal connection but, through Isabella, the prospect of obtaining former Moorish estates in the recently conquered Kingdom of Granada. The Catalan bargaining between king and pope extended to the all-important resolution of the quarrel between Spain and Portugal over the right to explore and colonize the New World, opened up by Columbus’s landing on Hispaniola which had become known in Rome in March of that year.
Hard on the Spanish envoy’s heels cam
e Federigo d’Aragona, the second son of King Ferrante of Naples (whose death had occurred in January), desperate to prevent Alexander promising the investiture of the Kingdom of Naples to Charles VIII of France. He offered a secret engagement between Jofre Borgia and Sancia, an illegitimate daughter of Ferrante’s successor, Alfonso Duke of Calabria, and to negotiate peace between Alexander and Virginio Orsini, who held a condotta from the King of Naples, and who was to pay the Pope a large sum in return for the investiture of the castles of Cerveteri and Anguillara. A reconciliation was arranged between Alexander and Giuliano della Rovere. Within weeks all was settled, Juan Gandia left early in August for his wedding in Barcelona, shortly after the publication of the socalled Alexandrine Bulls which resolved the question of the New World on terms favourable to Spain, while on 17 August Jofre was married by proxy to Sancia. Alexander’s diplomacy had won hands down, with rich marriages for his children, money and independence for himself. Although he intended to keep on good terms with all parties, his new pro-Aragonese stance did not in the end bode well for the Sforzas.
‘This Duke [Gandia] leaves very rich and loaded with jewels, money and other valuable portable goods and silver. It is said he will return within a year but leave all his goods in Spain and come back to reap another harvest,’ the Mantuan envoy reported.II A document from the archives of Valencia cathedral headed ‘Inventory of the property which His Holiness Our Lord ordered to be put in caskets for the Lord Duke’ provides a truly staggering view of the ostentatious wealth and resources of the Borgias. Boxes and boxes of rich velvet, damask, brocade, cloth of silver, satin and furs were loaded aboard his ship, curtains, cushions, bedcovers studded with gold, bed hangings in white damask brocade with gold fringes and crimson satin lining, tapestries woven with the history of Alexander the Great, and of Moses, huge quantities of table silver engraved with the ducal arms. One box contained jewels for Gandia and his duchess: a pendant to be worn in his cap consisted of a great emerald with a huge diamond above it, and a large pendant pearl, and a golden cross studded with pearls and diamonds to be given to the Duchess in which the Pope with his own hands had placed a piece of the True Cross.12
Lucrezia Borgia Page 4
