‘And when His Excellency asked him [Giovanni Sforza] if this [his alleged impotence and inability to consummate his marriage to Lucrezia] were true, he answered no. Rather, he had known her an infinite number of times. But the Pope had taken her away from him only in order to have her to himself . . .’
– Antonio Costabili, Ferrarese envoy in Rome to Duke Ercole I of Ferrara on the subject of Lucrezia’s divorce from Giovanni Sforza
By the late spring of 1495 the situation had changed dramatically for the Borgias. With no weapons other than his diplomatic skills and the power of his personality, Alexander had succeeded in outwitting the French King with a formidable force at his back. Charles had received fair words from the Pope and nothing more; having taken the road for Naples with Cesare in his train as hostage for his father’s good behaviour, he was incandescent with fury when Cesare, in a pre-arranged plan, escaped at Velletri disguised as a groom. When it was discovered that he had disappeared overnight and that all the trunks of his baggage train were loaded with stones, Charles’s mood darkened further. Furious, he declared, ‘All Italians are dirty dogs, and the Holy Father is the worst of them.‘ Within a few months of Charles’s departure from Rome, he was to discover what a formidable and cunning enemy he faced in Alexander who succeeded in uniting a daunting array of powers against him. On 31 March 1495 a Holy League against the French was announced between Milan, Venice, Spain, the papacy and the Emperor.
Meanwhile, in Naples Charles’s position was becoming untenable; where he had at first been welcome he was now hated. Although hideous in appearance – ‘more like a monster than a man’, as one commentator described him, he was a relentless womanizer. ‘[the] was one of the most lascivious men in France, and was very fond of copulation, and of changing his dishes, so that once he had had a woman, he cared no more about her, taking his pleasure with new ones . . .’ wrote an observer. His soldiery were no better: ‘The French were clownish, dirty, and dissolute people . . . They were always to be found in sin and venereal acts.’ When the main body of the French army finally left the Kingdom in May, making for home, they took with them not just plunder but syphilis, a terrifying new disease, which spread like wildfire through Europe.
As they approached Rome on their way north, Alexander and Cesare, with nineteen cardinals and a large force of papal, Milanese and Venetian troops, beat a strategic retreat, first to Orvieto and then to Perugia. Realizing there was nothing further to be gained by remaining in Italy, where he could be cut off and trapped by the League, Charles made off northwards. At Fornovo on the River Taro he met the forces of the League under the command of Francesco Gonzaga. The Italians claimed a famous victory and Gonzaga commissioned his favourite painter, Andrea Mantegna, to execute the Madonna della Vittoria (ironically, now in the Louvre) to commemorate it, but the inescapable fact was that Charles got away, leaving behind on the field of battle his Neapolitan plunder, including a book containing the portraits of the ladies whose favours he had enjoyed in ‘Naples’. At the end of June, the Borgias returned to Rome.
The triumph of the Borgia Pope and his family was celebrated in the heart of the Vatican where Bernardino Pinturicchio had completed the decoration of the Borgia Apartments (which still exist) as a flamboyant demonstration of their Spanish origins and family pride. Here, covering walls and ceiling in almost megalomaniac repetition, are the two Borgia devices, the double crown of Aragon, symbol of the royal house from which, quite fictitiously, they claimed descent, and to which they have added sun rays or flames pointing downwards, and the grazing ox of their original emblem transformed into a rampant, virile, pagan bull.
These rooms have an alien, defiantly Spanish feeling: the tiled floors blaze with the Aragonese double crown, the frames surrounding Pinturicchio’s frescoes are coloured, geometric stucco work, recalling the Moorish craftsmanship of Granada and Seville. One fresco depicts the unmistakable, powerful figure of Alexander, clothed in a cope studded with jewels and pearls, his profile expressing not spirituality but a sensual vitality. Frescoes in the adjoining Sala dei Santi incorporated supposed portraits of his children – Cesare, Lucrezia and Juan Gandia.1
Lucrezia was still in Pesaro in the spring of 1495 when Giovanni Sforza, in the wake of an exchange of visits between Pesaro and Urbino, wrote to the Gonzaga boasting that ‘without fail’ he would send his wife to Rome after Easter ‘from where she will not leave until she has obtained all we desire [for Sigismondo to be made cardinal] because no one else can achieve this better, I am sending her and she goes willingly to serve Your Excellency to whom she is devoted . . .’2 But for all his boasting, Sforza did not trust the Borgias, as whining letters he wrote from Pesaro to Ludovico il Moro in March and April demonstrated.3 On 18 March he wrote to Ludovico telling him that at dawn that morning a messenger from the Pope had arrived, forbidding him to leave home (presumably to go to Rome) and then ordering him to join the service of the Pope, Milan and Venice. Sforza said he planned instead to go to Milan, throw himself into his arms and place himself and his state under Ludovico’s protection. One wonders what he was afraid of.
For all Giovanni Sforza’s boasting, Lucrezia had not so far succeeded in obtaining the cardinal’s hat for Sigismondo Gonzaga, as his brother Francesco complained bitterly to Ludovico Sforza.4 In his role as Captain General of Venice commanding the forces of the League, Francesco visited both Lucrezia and Cesare when he passed through Rome en route for Naples in March 1496 where the remaining French were besieged in Atella. Alexander presented him with the Golden Rose for his services to the League and the Church but he had preferred to strengthen his own position by the appointment as cardinals of intimates whose loyalty was assured: his cousin, Juan de Borja-Llançol, the Valencians, Juan Llopis and Bartolomeu Marti, and the Catalan Juan de Castre-Pinos. As the victor of Fornovo and the foremost soldier in Italy, Francesco Gonzaga, with his dark, sensual looks, no doubt made an impression on Lucrezia and he was destined to play a major role in her life. What Gonzaga, married to the formidable Isabella d’Este and with a mistress by whom he had three children, thought of the fifteen-year-old Countess of Pesaro is not recorded. His opinion of her father no doubt coincided with that of his scatological correspondent, Floriano Dolfo, who in a long letter wrote of ‘this our Pope who brought to this rose [the Golden Rose] such a stink of trickery, simony, quarrels and cankers that not even the perfume of so noble a flower can overcome it . . .5
Giovanni Sforza was not in Rome (although he had apparently been in January); rather, he was in Pesaro, putting his troops in order prior to joining Gonzaga in the Kingdom and going through the usual protracted negotiations with the Pope and the Duke of Milan over money for his condotta.6 He arrived in Rome on 16 April and remained there for ten days extracting money from the Pope and resisting all attempts to make him leave earlier.7 Something was wrong in his relationship with Lucrezia. The Mantuan envoy Gian Carlo Scalona made dark hints as to the reason for Sforza’s departure on 28 April – ‘perhaps he has something at home, something which others would not suspect’ – adding that he had left in a most desperate state of mind and would not return, ‘leaving his wife under the apostolic mantle’, a phrase which has been interpreted as a suggestion of incest. No hint of this, however, appears in the correspondence of Ascanio Sforza and the Milanese envoy Stefano Taberna, who, being close to Giovanni, would have been in a position to know.
With Giovanni Sforza out of the way, the summer of 1496 was notable for a series of Borgia family reunions, celebrated with their customary pomp. In May, Jofre and Sancia returned to Rome, their entry into the city organized by Alexander and Cesare with all the showmanship of which they were past masters. Entering by the Lateran Gate, the couple were greeted by the households of all the cardinals, the commander of the Vatican Guard at the head of two hundred soldiers, the ambassadors of Spain, Milan, Naples, Venice and the Empire, with the senators, nobles and leading citizens of Rome. Lucrezia, anxious not to be outshone by her sister-in-law, of whose attractions she had already
heard much, was gorgeously dressed to meet her. Jofre and Sancia rode to the Vatican where Alexander peeped down at their approach through a half-closed shutter before going down with Cesare to greet them. The atmosphere of sexuality surrounding Sancia, and indeed the Borgia court, emerges clearly in this description by Scalona:
In truth she did not appear as beautiful as she had been made out to be. Indeed the lady of Pesaro [Lucrezia] surpassed her. However that may be, by her gestures and aspect the sheep will put herself easily at the disposal of the wolf. She has also some ladies of hers who are in no way inferior to their mistress, thus they say publicly it will be a fine flock . . . She is more than twenty-two years old, naturally dark, with glancing eyes, an aquiline nose and very well made up, and will in my opinion not give the lie to my predictions . . .8
He dismissed Jofre as ‘dark in complexion and otherwise lascivious-looking with long hair with a reddish tinge . . . and he is fourteen or fifteen years of age’.
Sancia’s behaviour and reputation were such that, as early as June 1494, the Catalan master of the Squillace household had felt it necessary to issue a sworn declaration with the testimony of a dozen witnesses denying improprieties: ‘I, Anthoni Gurrea, give testimony that in the Household of the Prince of Squillace the government of the Ladies is so honest and of such good order as is possible to have. And in the chamber of the Princess no man whatever is entertained . . .’9 Jofre was too young and too insignificant to satisfy Sancia; within months she found a man more to her taste in Cesare. She and Lucrezia became close friends: at a service in St Peter’s later that month the two girls shocked the papal master of ceremonies when, during a long and tedious sermon, they climbed to the choir reserved for the canons and sat there laughing and chatting with their ladies.
The Borgia family circle was complete with the arrival from Spain of Juan Gandia on 10 August. The twenty-year-old duke was dressed to the nines in a scarlet cap hung with pearls, a doublet of brown velvet blazing with jewels, black stockings embroidered with the golden crown and rays of Gandia and a long Turkish mantle of gold brocade. His bay horse was adorned with gold fringes and silver bells which tinkled as he rode, and he was accompanied by six squires, including a Moor dressed in gold brocade and crimson velvet, twelve splendid horses ridden by pages and a crowd of dwarfs and jesters. The role for which he was destined by his doting father was to crush the Orsini whose treachery in the last days of 1494 had not been forgotten and whose dominance of the Roman Campagna represented a serious threat to the independence of the papacy. Now, with the head of the clan, Virginio, and his eldest legitimate son, Giangiordano, in prison in Naples after the final surrender of the remaining French, Alexander saw his chance. It was the right strategy at the right moment, but in choosing Juan, a youth with no military experience, to lead the campaign, nominally headed by the cultured but feeble Guidobaldo, Duke of Montefeltro, as Captain General of the League, Alexander was making a serious mistake.
On 26 October, to the sound of trumpets, Gandia was invested in St Peter’s with the titles of Captain General of the Church and Gonfalonier (Standard Bearer). Alexander was beside himself with joy and pride while Scalona wrote scornfully: ‘The Pope is so swollen up and inflated with this election of his son, that he does not know what to do with himself, and this morning desired to set a feather in his cap with his own hands and sew on a jewel of great value . . .’10 Unsurprisingly the campaign was a failure: at the great fortress of Bracciano, a woman, Bartolommea d’Alviano, wife of the most able of the Orsini captains, held out. The Orsini rampaged up to the walls of Rome, mocking Gandia by sending into the papal camp a large donkey with a placard ‘I am the ambassador of the Duke of Gandia’ round its neck and a rude letter addressed to him under its tail. At Soriano in January the papal army was defeated and Guidobaldo captured. The Orsini were now masters of the Roman Campagna and Alexander was left with little alternative but to make peace in February 1497. The Orsini retained all their castles except for Cerveteri and Anguillara which the Pope held as security against the payment of 50,000 ducats. He refused to ransom Guidobaldo and gave the major part of the Orsini indemnity to the undeserving GandiaII in compensation for having failed to secure the Orsini lands. In March, Gandia, with the help of the great Spanish general Gonsalvo de Cordoba, took Ostia from the only French garrison remaining on Italian soil.
The exercise of Spanish military might on Alexander’s side boded ill for the Sforza; that very week, at the end of March, Giovanni Sforza, who had been at the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico with Lucrezia since mid January, fled precipitately from Rome to Pesaro, without informing either Ascanio or Ludovico Sforza. It had been clear since the beginning of the year that things had been going wrong in the Sforza marriage, as a letter of 7 January written from Pesaro by Giovanni to Ludovico revealed. The Pope, he said, had been putting pressure on him to return to Rome but he had excused himself on the grounds of indisposition. Recently, however, a brief had arrived from Alexander giving him eight days in which to comply.12 A report from Scalona to Mantua that Sforza was in high favour with the Pope and that Lucrezia was now content and much in love with him seems to have been wide of the mark.13 The hastiness and secrecy of his departure – he feigned to be going to a pardon ceremony outside the gates of Rome where in reality he had horses waiting for him – suggests that Giovanni had heard something to make him afraid of the Borgias. It may be that hints had been dropped, probably by Cesare, that as a husband for Lucrezia he was surplus to requirements. Scalona reported that there were rumours the Borgias would have him poisoned but that he himself believed these to be without foundation. Il Moro was seriously concerned at the possibility of a rupture with the Pope: much as he despised and distrusted Alexander, he needed his political support. The unwelcome prospect of a divorce seems to have been in the back of his mind when he drafted a request to be taken to Giovanni: ‘We wish that His Lordship will make clear to us the reasons he left so precipitately from Rome. And whether this has arisen because he has not yet consummated his marriage with his wife. Make him understand so that we may find some convenient remedy. And concerning this tell him that we pray he will declare his mind as he should . . .’14 The wretched Sforza replied that the Pope was furious with him and demanded his return, threatening that if he did not do so of his own accord he would be forced to. He added that the Pope was using his flight as an excuse to deprive him of his wife absolutely without any reason in spite of his just demand (for Lucrezia to go to Pesaro).
By 4 May, Ludovico had learned – presumably from his ambassador Taberna – the cause of Sforza’s flight, namely Borgia threats. He was all the more surprised, therefore, to receive a request from the Pope to intervene to obtain Giovanni’s return to Rome. Puzzled, he pressed his nephew to tell him the exact reasons both for his abrupt departure from Rome and his refusal to return there; he must do so either by letter or orally if it seemed to him something which should not be committed to paper. He promised Giovanni that he would not force him to return to Rome. 15 Giovanni, clearly still in a state of panic and confusion, assured Ludovico of his loyal gratitude but said that he was sending a trusted messenger to Rome to ask Alexander to permit Lucrezia to come to Pesaro, as was only reasonable, and that if the Pope later wanted them both to return to Rome he would be content to do so. The messenger was instructed to go then to Ludovico with the Pope’s answer and to explain to him why Giovanni was unwilling to return to Rome so that Ludovico would understand that he had good reason for his actions.16 By I June, Ludovico had received letters from Ascanio in Rome informing him of the Pope’s fixed desire for a dissolution of the marriage. Giovanni rode to Urbino to consult Guidobaldo, who had been released after paying his own ransom, and returned to Pesaro ‘ill-content’. The arrival five days later of Fra Mariano, Alexander’s envoy, in Pesaro provoked Giovanni into a panic flight to consult with Ludovico in Milan. The Mantuan representative in Urbino, Silvestro Calandra, reported to Francesco Gonzaga on 6 June that he left ‘incognito,
desperate and in a hurry’. Guidobaldo was sending a trusted servant to inform the Marquis ‘of the bad behaviour of the Pope to the damage and shame of Signor Giovanni . . .’ 17 In another move of sinister purport to the Sforza interest, there were reports that the Pope had come to an agreement with Ascanio’s enemy and rival, Giuliano della Rovere, with whom he had been negotiating for some time, that della Rovere should come back to Rome from France with all his offences pardoned and his benefices restored.
Meanwhile Lucrezia, the victim at the eye of the storm, left the Vatican on 4 June accompanied by her household and took refuge with the nuns of the Dominican convent of San Sisto, a pattern of behaviour she repeated throughout her troubled life at times of particular pressure. No one seems to have penetrated the depths of her feelings at this time but they appear to have been rebellious. One observer18 said that she had left her father ‘as an unwelcome guest’, in other words, she had quarrelled with the Pope, presumably over the divorce proceedings, another that she had parted from her husband some months ago ‘on unamicable terms’. From the distance of Urbino, Calandra reported that her father had sent the bargello (sheriff or constable of police) to fetch her out of the convent, but she did not leave.19 Most probably she had gone there of her own accord, to escape from the tensions created by her father and brothers, both of whom had declared she should never return to Sforza. Reports of the divorce, and the reasons which were to be put forward for it, were already public, as the always well-informed Venetian diarist Marin Sanudo wrote. The Pope had sent Lucrezia to a convent – ‘it was said for two reasons: the first that, before he married her to the said lord of Pesaro, he had promised her to another lord in Spain [Procida]; secondly, it is said that since she was married the said lord has never consummated the marriage because he was impotent. And that he [the Pope] will undertake a process and then, if it was so, will dissolve the marriage . . .’20 Another report alleged that Juan Gandia would take her with him to Spain because of the divorce, and that the Pope was so set upon the dissolution of the marriage that he had even offered to allow Giovanni Sforza to keep Lucrezia’s dowry. Ascanio Sforza wrote to Ludovico on 14 June that the breach between Lucrezia and Giovanni was final, that the Pope, supported by Cesare and Juan, had declared that Lucrezia could not remain in the hands of such a man, that the marriage had never been consummated and could and should be annulled.21 From Milan the Ferrarese Antonio Costabili wrote to his master, Duke Ercole, reporting that Giovanni Sforza had been there to implore Duke Ludovico to persuade the Pope to allow Lucrezia to return to him; this the Pope had refused to do on the grounds that he had never been able to consummate the marriage despite all the years they had spent together. ‘And when His Excellency asked him if this were true, he answered no. Rather, he had known her an infinite number of times. But the Pope had taken her away from him only in order to have her to himself and he expressed himself at length on the subject of His Holiness.’ Ludovico unkindly suggested to Giovanni that the Pope should send Lucrezia to the castle of Nepi, then in the hands of his brother Ascanio, where Giovanni could also go and consummate his marriage so that the Pope would restore her to him. Sforza declined the offer and still more the suggestion that he should prove himself ‘with Women’ in the presence of the papal legate. And given that he (Giovanni) refused both alternatives, il Moro asked him how they could say that he was impotent considering that he had made the sister of the Marquis of Mantua pregnant (Sforza’s late wife, Maddalena Gonzaga, had died in childbirth in 1490). To which he replied – ‘Your Excellency can see for yourself, they still say that I had her made pregnant by another.’ This, Costabili added, made Ludovico think that if the lord of Pesaro were to be given ‘two twists of the rope (due tracti di corda) he would confess to never having done anything either with the sister of the Marquis of Mantua or with this one [Lucrezia] because if he really was potent he would have wanted to give some proof of himself. This gave His Highness to believe that if Sforza was not constrained to give up the dowry, he would not put up much objection to the divorce.’22
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