The Borgias’ plans were put into a temporary state of suspension by the brief return on 5 February 1500 of Ludovico to Milan and the defeat of the French in Lombardy; without the help of the French, Cesare was not yet strong enough to pursue his conquest of the Romagna. But on 10 April, il Moro was decisively defeated by the French at Novara, taken prisoner and immured in the fortress of Loches in Touraine, where he died eight years later. It was a sad end for the once magnificent Duke of Milan, born for his own ruin as much as that of his country. Leonardo da Vinci recorded in his notebook an epitaph on his former patron: ‘The Duke has lost fortune, state and liberty, and not one of his works has been completed.’ The news was greeted with cries of ‘Urso [Orsini]’ and ‘Francia’ by the many Orsini partisans in the city and fires were lit outside the Orsini palace of Montegiordano and in the piazza outside the Pantheon. Ascanio was also captured and imprisoned in Bourges. The Pope, who had given 100 ducats to the messenger who had brought the news of Ludovico’s downfall, rewarded with the same sum the tidings of the downfall of Ascanio, his old ally. According to Burchard:
The Pope has had from him [Ascanio] very pitiful, plaintive letters, in which he recounts how he has lost in three days, his brother, his State, his honour, his possessions and the liberty of his person, beseeching His Holiness that, in whatever manner it may seem best to him, he should deign to consider his liberation, signing himself: infelix et afflictus Ascanius [‘unhappy and afflicted Ascanio’]. The College [of Cardinals] has discussed it, and the Pope keeps the matter to himself, and shows himself well content with this matter or not, according to the person with whom he is speaking: moreover he shows no compassion . . .
Far from showing compassion, Alexander immediately took advantage of Ascanio’s misfortune, seizing his art treasures and giving away his benefices to new allies, such as Giuliano della Rovere.16
With the Sforzas out of the way, the Borgias’ hopes rested with France and Louis XII who, having regained his Milanese duchy, now looked to assert his rights to his Neapolitan kingdom. In this event, the Aragonese, including Alfonso Bisceglie, would be swept away just as the Sforzas had been. A decision handed down by Alexander at the beginning of April had indicated which way the wind was blowing when he gave sentence against Alfonso’s relation, Beatrice d’Aragona, Queen of Hungary, daughter of King Ferrante, whose husband, Ladislaus Jagiello, had repudiated her, asking for an annulment. The line-up of the powers in this case was significant: the Emperor, the Kings of Spain and Naples and the Milanese interest supported her; the French and Venice took the opposite side. Alfonso Bisceglie complained bitterly of the Pope’s decision, as Antonio Malegonelle reported to the Signoria of Florence: ‘It seems to me of great significance this sentence against the Queen of Hungary, concerning which sentence as it happens, I being in the Camera del Pappagallo, heard the Duke of Bisceglie condoling greatly with the Ambassador of Naples, not noticing that I overheard him . . .17
Alfonso’s sister Sancia made her feelings clear when a Burgundian and a Frenchman quarrelled over a banner and the Burgundian challenged the Frenchman to a duel. When Cesare heard of it, he offered the Burgundian 20 ducats, brocade clothes and a new banner if he would give up the fight. The Burgundian refused and won the duel, which took place on 9 April. As a gesture of defiance to Cesare, Sancia had dressed twelve of her squires in livery bearing the cross of St Andrew in honour of the Burgundian. ‘It was said,’ Burchard wrote, ‘that he [Cesare] would rather have lost 20,000 ducats than see the Frenchman beaten.’ The affair between Cesare and Sancia was long over: that summer he took up with a beautiful, rich and intelligent courtesan, the Florentine Fiammetta de’Michelis. Fiammetta owned three houses in the city, including one on the piazza named after her near the Piazza Navona, and a country villa, or vigna. She was typical of the high-class courtesans of her time who liked to show off their intellectual abilities. Fiammetta spoke Latin, declaimed Ovid and Petrarch from memory and sang delightfully, accompanying herself on the lyre. Her relationship with Cesare was so well known that her will in the city archives was headed ‘The Testament of la Fiammetta of il Valentino’. Lucrezia, however, sided with the husband she loved and with his sister. She was not prepared to change her loyalties to follow her father and elder brother and, conscious of her father’s continuing favour, was confident of her power to protect Alfonso.
At the end of June 1500 the Borgia party in Rome was shaken by the Pope’s near fatal accident when a whirlwind struck the Vatican, causing the roof of the Sala dei Papi where he was sitting to fall in. The Sienese banker Lorenzo Chigi, with whom he was conversing, was killed outright; the Cardinal of Capua and Gaspar Poto, the Pope’s secret chamberlain who were in the room, saved themselves by standing in the window niches. Alexander escaped death only because the canopy over the papal throne protected him, but he was struck on the head and rendered unconscious. In his apartment beneath, Cesare had left the room shortly beforehand, but three people who had been there with him died. Rumours spread that the Pope was dead and armed men crowded the Vatican but despite being bled of thirteen ounces of blood, Alexander recovered quickly. Sanudo, the first outsider to visit him following his accident, found him in the bosom of his family – Lucrezia, Sancia, Cesare and Jofre. If Alfonso Bisceglie was there, the diarist did not mention him; he did, however, record that one of Lucrezia’s ladies, ‘the Pope’s favourite’, was at the seventy-year-old pontiff’s bedside.18 The young Borgias realized only too well how their fortunes depended on the Pope’s life. Despite his tremendous vitality, Alexander was subject to fainting fits and fevers which suggest high blood pressure, bad enough to be public knowledge among Vatican observers.
Just over two weeks later, on Wednesday 15 July, Alfonso Bisceglie was attacked on the steps of St Peter’s by ‘persons unknown’. Francesco Cappello reported to Florence the next day:
Yesterday evening at three hours of the night [he] left the Palace and was going to his house which is beside St Peter’s on the Piazza, and being on the steps of St Peter’s, under the balcony of the Benediction, accompanied by only two of his grooms because he was unsuspecting, four men attacked him very well armed and dealt him three blows: one on the head, very deep; and one across the shoulder, either one of which could be mortal: and another small one on the arm: and by what is known the wounds are of a gravity that he will be in need of God’s help: and this evening now they have examined his wounds, they say he is very ill. Who may have wounded him, no one says, and it is not obvious that diligent inquiries are being made as they should be, nor is it much spoken of. Indeed around Rome it is rumoured that these things are amongst their very selves, because in that Palace there are so many hatreds both old and new, and so much envy and jealousy both for reasons of State and others, that it is necessary often to hide similar scandals. It is said that the wounded duke was taken back into the Palace, and the Pope got up and went to see him, and Madonna Lucrezia was in a dead faint.19
According to Burchard, the attackers then fled by the steps of St Peter’s to where around forty horsemen awaited them, with whom they rode out through the Porta Pertusa. Cattaneo wrote to Isabella d’Este that the assailants were dragging Alfonso away, possibly to throw him in the river, when they were surprised by the guards. According to him, the Pope was distressed and had his wounded son-in-law carried up thirty steps to apartments above his own. Three days later Lucrezia was reported as ill of a fever because of her anguish.
Once again, as in the case of Gandia, the attack on Bisceglie, ‘a lord who was nephew of a late king, son of a present king and son-in-law of the Pope’, was said to have been ordered by someone very powerful – ‘someone with more power than him’.20 Sanudo reported, ‘it is not known who wounded the said Duke, but it is said that it was whoever killed and threw into the Tiber the Duke of Gandia . . .’21 Fear now ruled the city: Cesare issued an edict forbidding the carrying of arms in the Borgo between Sant’Angelo and St Peter’s. Suspicion was rife but people dared not name names. Al
fonso’s former tutor, Raphael Brandolinus Lippi, who received a stipend from the papal court, wrote to Ferrara on the day following the attack: ‘Whose was the hand behind the assassins is still unknown. I will not, however, repeat which names are being voiced, because it is grave and perilous to entrust it to a letter.’
One name, however, was being voiced within twenty-four hours of the attempt on Bisceglie – that of Cesare. On 16 July, Vincenzo Calmeta, poet and papal secretary, wrote his former patroness, the Duchess of Urbino, a detailed account of it, ending: ‘Who may have ordered this thing to be done, everyone thinks to be the Duke Valentino.’ Alfonso’s wounds should not prove fatal, he said, adding significantly, ‘if some new accident does not intervene’. Others saw the hand of the Orsini in the affair, since Alfonso was in league with the pro-Neapolitan Colonna. Although the Orsini were the most likely authors, or rather bunglers, of the assassination attempt, it is feasible to consider that Cesare might have had foreknowledge of it – he had his own reasons for wishing his brother-in-law out of the way – and he, rather than the Orsini, would have had intimate information as to Alfonso’s movements. He is reported to have said: ‘I did not wound the Duke, but if I had, it would have been no more than he deserved.’ The one factor which might be seen to exculpate him from the actual planning of the attack was the bungling of its execution: his own henchmen never failed to carry out his orders, as events were soon to show.
Lucrezia and, apparently Alexander, were taking no chances. Only the doctor sent by the King of Naples was allowed to attend Alfonso while Lucrezia prepared his food herself for fear of poison. On 18 August, almost exactly a month after the attack, Alfonso, much recovered, was sitting up in his bed in his room in the Torre Borgia, talking and laughing with his wife, his sister, his uncle and the envoy, when sudden violence erupted. According to Brandolinus:
. . . there burst into the chamber Michelotto [Miguel da Corella] most sinister minister of Cesare Valentino; he seized by force Alfonso’s uncle and the royal envoy [of Naples], and having bound their hands behind their backs, consigned them to armed men who stood behind the door, to lead them to prison. Lucrezia, Alfonso’s wife, and Sancia, his sister, stupefied by the suddenness and violence of the act, shrieked at Michelotto, demanding how he dared commit such an offence before their very eyes and in the presence of Alfonso. He excused himself as persuasively as he could, declaring that he was obeying the will of others, that he had to live by the orders of another, but that they, if they wished, might go to the Pope, and it would be easy to obtain the release of the arrested men. Carried away with anger and pity . . . the two women went to the Pope, and insisted that he give them the prisoners. Meanwhile Michelotto, most wretched of criminals and most criminal of wretches, suffocated Alfonso who was indignantly reproving him for his offence. The women, returning from the Pope, found armed men at the door of the chamber, who prevented them from entering and announced that Alfonso was dead . . . The women, terrified by this most cruel deed, oppressed by fear, beside themselves with grief, filled the palace with their shrieking, lamenting and wailing, one calling on her husband, the other on her brother, and their tears were without end.
This time there was no doubt as to who had ordered the crime: Michelotto, an illegitimate son of the Count of Corella and a close confidant of Cesare, was well known to be Cesare’s ‘executioner’. From the first assault, Francesco Cappello had diagnosed its cause as ‘a matter between themselves, because in that Palace there are so many old and new hatreds, and so much envy and jealousy for political reasons and others . . .’ An internal power struggle between the partisans of France and those of Aragon had been waged in the Vatican for some time past, the ultimate prize being the mind of the Pope. There is little doubt that while Cesare was away in France the Aragonese party round Alfonso and Sancia had tried to win back Alexander to his old allegiance to Spain and the house of Aragon from which Louis’s promises for Cesare had weaned him. When Cesare returned to Rome after his prolonged absence, he was quick to sense an undercurrent within the family circle in opposition to his interests. Sancia and Jofre, Alfonso and Lucrezia had lived on terms of the closest intimacy since Alfonso had rejoined the family in Spoleto the previous autumn and Sancia had been allowed to return to Rome some time during the winter. This close-knit clique would clearly have had Aragonese sympathies: Jofre, a cipher, in the absence of his elder brother was dominated by his strong-willed wife, while Lucrezia, who had wept so bitterly when Alfonso left Rome, had clearly been much in love with him.
With his fiercely competitive nature and overriding ambition, Cesare was not a man to brook opposition within his own family circle, above all when it threatened his own interests, not only his political commitment to the French alliance, but also his personal position within the Vatican and his two closest relationships with his father and sister. At this stage in his career, dependent on his father as the source of his power, he was determined that Alexander should follow the path which suited his interests, and that no one should come between them. As far as Lucrezia was concerned, his intense love for her was well known, and while he may have feared that her pro-Aragonese sympathies might have influenced her father, who doted on her, jealousy of her evident feeling for her husband would have fuelled his hatred for Alfonso. Thus Cesare saw Alfonso as a threat to himself which must be eliminated and, in the political context of a French campaign against Naples, as an embarrassment whose removal would be an advantage. He may well initially have made use of the Orsini to attack Alfonso and, when they bungled it, waited to see if his brother-in-law would die of his wounds. When it became obvious that Alfonso was recovering, Cesare took direct and brutal steps to finish him off.
The excuse given out for this cruel murder was that Alfonso had attempted to kill Cesare with a crossbow shot as he walked in the garden. It was necessary to persuade Alexander, who had originally been very upset by the assault on Alfonso, that his son-in-law had deserved to die. Alexander seems to have accepted it but almost no one else did. Brandolinus gave the majority verdict on the murder of Bisceglie: it was, he wrote, motivated by ‘the supreme lust for dominion of Cesare Valentino Borgia’.
Lucrezia, however, did not accept it. She grieved for Alfonso and raged against her father and brother. Her grief irritated and displeased Alexander and early in September she was packed off to Nepi to mourn out of sight. On 4 September, Cattaneo reported to Mantua that the Pope ‘has sent away his daughter and his daughter-in-law and everyone except Valencia because in the end they were wearisome to him’. Cesare, ostentatiously guarded, visited Lucrezia the day after the unfortunate Alfonso had been privately and hastily interred, as Cattaneo reported: ‘Valentia goes about very strong and heavily guarded now and the second day after Don Alfonso was most privately buried, this Valentia went to visit his sister D. Lucretia in her house which adjoins Valentia’s apartments. From the Palace he entered her antechamber in the midst of one hundred halberdiers in full armour, and seems to have great suspicion of the Colonnesi and the King of Naples, it seeming to him that there can be no more friendship between them.’22 Whether Lucrezia forgave him for murdering her husband, there is no way of knowing. It seems a proof of the extraordinary affection between them that Cesare could contemplate visiting her so soon. Perhaps he attempted to excuse himself on the grounds of Alfonso plotting against him; perhaps he also revealed to her his future campaign which would include the destruction of her first husband, Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro. He may even have told her of the plans he and Alexander had for her. On the day Lucrezia left for Nepi, her father was reported as already contemplating a third marriage for her, collecting money for her dowry with the nomination of further cardinals.23
The murder of Bisceglie, a deliberate act of terror, had had its effect. The Borgias, and Cesare in particular, were now regarded with fear and horror. As the Florentine Francesco Cappello wrote in a cipher letter reporting Bisceglie’s death to his government: ‘I pray Your Lordships to take this for your own in
formation, and not to show it to others, for these [the Borgias] are men to be watched, otherwise they have done a thousand villainies, and have spies in every place.’ That autumn, the Venetian envoy Polo Capello made a long report to the Senate concerning the Borgias. The Pope, he said ‘is seventy and grows younger every day. Worries never last him a night: he loves life, and is of a joyful nature and does what suits him.’ As Pope, his power in Rome was absolute: ‘The Cardinals without the Pope can do zero’; only Giuliano della Rovere was marked down as a dangerous man. Alexander’s resilience was indeed remarkable: neither his recent escape from death nor the murder of his son-in-law, not even his daughter’s grief, affected him. Giulia Farnese, whose husband had been killed by a falling roof that August, had returned and was once more by his side. Capello’s picture of Cesare was far more sinister: ‘the Pope loves and fears his son who is twenty-seven, physically most beautiful, he is tall and well made . . . he is munificent, even prodigal, and this displeases the Pope’. As early as July the acute Cattaneo had diagnosed the scope of the Borgias’ ambitions for Cesare. ‘The Pope plans to make him great and king of Italy, if he can,’ he wrote, ‘nor am I dreaming but everything can be described and written down, and so that others will not think my brains are disordered, I will say no more . . .’ Capello expressed similar opinions: ‘He will be, if he lives, one of the first captains of Italy.’ But while admitting Cesare’s talent and physical beauty, Capello went on to depict him as a sadistic murderer, stabbing Perotto as he cowered under the Pope’s cloak so that the blood spurted up in Alexander’s face, ordering the death of Gandia and wholesale assassinations: ‘Every day in Rome one finds men murdered, four or five a night, bishops, prelates and others . . .’
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