Ercole Strozzi was a member of the Florentine banking family exiled by the Medici and now established in Ferrara. Despite being so lame that he had to walk with a crutch, he was an intense womanizer and a natural romantic, with a taste for dangerous love affairs. He had been in love for ten years with a woman who was not only married but also had a lover described by contemporaries as ‘vir magnus’, a powerful man. Strozzi was captivated by Lucrezia and soon became her closest male confidant in Ferrara and the facilitator of her love affairs, a dangerous course which may have led to his violent death five years later. Ercole had succeeded his father (who had made himself deeply hated by the populace for his extortions) as Giudice dei XII Savi, leader of the principal administrative council of Ferrara, and as such was a prominent citizen with easy access to the court.
Strozzi became indispensable to Lucrezia; like her he adored extravagant clothes and, although coming from a rich family, was perennially short of money. On frequent visits to Venice (still, after the fall of Constantinople, the main source of textiles from the Ottoman Empire) he acquired wonderful materials for her wardrobe, as witnessed by repeated entries in her wardrobe account books, beginning as early as July 1502, when he provided lengths of the much-prized white ‘tabi’.5 Despite the lavish trousseau she had brought with her from Rome, Strozzi’s contributions feature on almost every page of her wardrobe accounts for the years 1502—3. Encouraged perhaps by Ercole’s concessions over her allowance, she was generous in providing clothing: on 19 June 1503 she had four doublets for Cesare’s lute players made up, and a robe for ‘Zoanmaria the Jew’, one of his musicians. Two yellow velvet doublets were made for woodwind players (piffari) to be sent to Cesare that year. There were skirts and other clothing for Angela Borgia, Girolama, Nicola, Catherinella and Camilla. On 9 August 1502, two capes in purple (paonazzo) satin were ordered for Giovanni Borgia and Rodrigo Bisceglie. From the same source it is apparent that Lucrezia in return loaned Strozzi money.
On 15 January 1503, Ercole Strozzi gave a ball for her, and it was at this ball that she renewed her brief acquaintance with the most famous of her lovers, Pietro Bembo. A member of a distinguished Venetian family, Bembo was well known in Ferrara, where his father Bernardo had acted as visdomino, or co-ruler, a deeply resented office imposed on the Ferrarese after they lost the war with Venice in 1484. Pietro had stayed on in Ferrara for a while after his father returned to Venice; the cultivated atmosphere of Ercole’s court suited his temperament better than the stern, hardheaded mercantile Republic. Bembo’s closest friend in Ferrara was Ercole Strozzi from whom he had heard about Lucrezia long before he met her. Since October 1502 he had been staying in Strozzi’s villa at Ostellato and had briefly entertained her there in mid November, writing afterwards to Ercole that he wished she had stayed longer, describing her as ‘such a beautiful and elegant woman who is not superstitious about anything’.6 After the ball in January, he boasted to his brother Carlo of how many compliments ‘la duchessa’ had paid him. ‘Every day,’ he added, ‘I find her a still worthier lady, seeing she has far excelled all my expectations, great though they were after hearing so many reports of her and most of all from Messer Ercole . . .’7 Ercole’s reports to Bembo about Lucrezia, which Bembo called ‘the Lucretian letters’, continued after Pietro left again for Ostellato. According to one authority8 Bembo was inspired to write verses in praise of Lucrezia which were secretly passed to her by his literary friends in Ferrara, Ariosto and, particularly, Ercole Strozzi.
Strozzi deliberately fanned the flames of Bembo’s passion; romantic adoration for Lucrezia became a cult between the two young poets. Very possibly he urged Lucrezia on in the relationship; romantic intrigue excited him and, as later became obvious, there was little love lost between him and Alfonso. Lucrezia entered into the teasing of Bembo with delight: on 24 April she addressed a letter to him in her distinctive hand but when he opened it there was only another letter from Strozzi. A month later, on 25 May, Lucrezia copied out in her own hand a love poem by the fifteenth-century Aragonese poet Lope de Estuniga, Yo piense si me muriese . . . The poem barely translates into English, a language with so different a rhythm:
I think were I to die
And with my wealth of pain
Cease longing,
Such great love to deny
Could make the world remain
Unloving.
When I consider this,
Death’s long delay is all
I must desire,
Since reason tells me bliss
Is felt by one in thrall
To such a fire.
Bembo responded with a poem of his own, in Tuscan, the language of his hero Petrarch, in which he described himself as caught in the beauty of Lucrezia’s blonde hair, which in his presence she let down loose on her shoulders and then with ‘two hands of immeasurable beauty’ bound up again and with them his heart. Three hundred years later, viewing what he called ‘the prettiest love letters in the world’ in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, Lord Byron stole a blonde thread from the lock of Lucrezia’s hair which she must have sent Bembo in response to this passionate poem. With this and another sonnet, Bembo sent Lucrezia the first volume of his famous prose poem Gli Asolani, ‘hich I received this very hour’.9 Lucrezia’s response was to ask him to suggest a motto for a medallion which she was thinking of having made featuring flames ‘according to that most subtle and most apt suggestion you gave me’, ‘. . . nothing can prevent me from ever adoring your name’, Bembo replied by courier that same day. ‘As for the fire on the gold medallion which your Ladyship has sent me with the request that I should devise a motto for inscription, I can think of no nobler location than the soul. Wherefore you might have it thus inscribed: EST ANIMUM . . .’10
Passionate but still apparently platonic: some time after this letter was written Bembo went to Ferrara to meet Lucrezia when they had an intimate conversation and may have exchanged declarations of love. This might be interpreted from Bembo’s subsequent letter written on 19 June from Ostellato: ‘Gazing these past days into my crystal [heart] of which we spoke during the last evening I paid my respects to your Ladyship, I have read therein, glowing at its centre, these lines I now send to you . . .’11 The sonnet Poi ch’ogni ardir was an expression of physical passion, still apparently unfulfilled. Lucrezia’s reply mirrored his: ‘Messer Pietro mio. Concerning the desire you have to hear from me regarding the counterpart of your or our crystal as it may be rightly reputed and termed, I cannot think what else to say or imagine save that it has an extreme affinity of which the like perhaps has never been equalled in any age . . . And let it be a gospel everlasting.’ The situation was clearly becoming serious, even dangerous; from now on her name was to be ‘f.f.’ Bembo’s reply was passionate: ‘Now is my crystal [heart] more precious to me than all the pearls of the Indian seas, and surely you have acted most mercifully in granting parity such as you have given it, and such company. God knows no human thing could be so dear to me as this certainty . . .’12 There has been much unresolved speculation, as to the precise meaning of ‘f.f.’ Two years later Lucrezia had a portrait medallion struck with, on the reverse, a blindfolded cupid bound to an oak tree and with the motto ‘FPHFF’. All that can be ascertained with any degree of certainty is that the need to use a pseudonym reflected the increasing depth of the relationship and perhaps also the dangers which this implied for both in Ferrara where the Este were all-powerful.
For the poet, unattached, ardent and living in the luxury of the Strozzi villa among the waterways and flat fields of Ostellato, twenty-five miles from Ferrara, there was no impediment to romantic dreams. But for Lucrezia, living in the enclosed circle of the court and constantly spied upon, life was more complicated. And in the distance, but always dominating the Italian political scene, were her father and brother. In his next letter written from Ostellato in late June, Bembo refers specifically to Lucrezia’s ‘vexations’ and ‘distress’ and ‘these present cares.’13 It is unclear fr
om this whether these may have been connected with Alfonso’s return to Ferrara (he had been away in May) or to Lucrezia’s own family situation.
At the beginning of 1503 Cesare’s fortunes, which seemed so bright, were actually on the cusp. Where his success had rested on his alliance with Louis XII, the King now blocked his path. Cesare had grown too powerful and Louis was unwilling to allow him to extend his dominion over either Bologna or, more particularly, Florence. Venice and the French-held Duchy of Milan obstructed his expansion northward; Cesare’s only real option was to turn southward. And, as always, the Kingdom of Naples loomed large in his calculations; here it was now Spain which was calling the shots. In a series of victories in April, the French in the Kingdom were routed by the Spanish forces under their brilliant commander, Gonsalvo da Cordoba; on the 13th Gonsalvo entered Naples. Alexander, Iberian at heart, had never really liked the French alliance, nor, rightly, had he trusted Louis. To the Bolognese envoy he made it plain that the French could not rely on the Borgias to win the Kingdom back for them: ‘We are resolved not to lose what we have acquired,’ he said, adding piously, ‘because we see that it is God’s will that the Spaniards have been victorious; and if God wills it thus, we must not wish it otherwise.’14
Unlike his father, Cesare kept his counsel as he considered his future. As Machiavelli was later to write of him in The Prince: ‘When the Duke had become very powerful and in part secure against present perils, since he was armed as he wished and had in part destroyed those forces that, as neighbours, could harm him, he still, if he intended to pursue his course, had before him the problem of the King of France, because he knew that the King, who too late had become aware of his mistake, would not tolerate further conquest. For this reason the Duke was looking for new alliances and wavering in his dealings with France . . .’ The first public sign of the way Cesare’s thoughts were tending came with the nomination of the new cardinals early in May: five of the nine were Catalans, either close relations or dependants of the Borgias. There was not one Frenchman.
Lucrezia naturally had her own sources of information in the Borgia camp, although it is unlikely that she was ever consulted by Cesare, now totally dominant in the partnership with his father. In February she had a new source of information in Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, recently returned from Rome where he had enjoyed an affair with Sancia, now once again unaccountably confined to Sant’Angelo by Alexander. There were rumours, as always with il Valentino, that Ippolito had fled Rome from fear of Cesare although it is unlikely that Cesare would have cared what Sancia did, powerless as she was but still his sworn enemy. Moreover, Alexander specifically expressed his delight at Lucrezia’s friendship with Ippolito: ‘She spends the night with Don Alfonso and the day with the Cardinal d’Este, who was with her all day and accompanied her wherever she went,’ he declared proudly to Costabili, adding that the three of them were ‘three bodies and one sole mind’.15
Lucrezia formed a close alliance with Ippolito, as she had with all the Este brothers, a key factor in the dangerous situations which surrounded her. The first public sign of trouble came with the murder of the hitherto most trusted Borgia henchman, Francesco Troche. On the night of 8 June, Troche was strangled on a boat moored on the Tiber. According to Costabili’s account, Cesare interviewed the prisoner and then ‘His Excellency placing himself in a spot where he could see and not be seen, Troche was strangled by the hand of Don Michele . . .’ (Michelotto). It was all too reminiscent of the murder of Alfonso Bisceglie. Count Lodovico Pico della Mirandola, then one of Cesare’s captains, wrote in a letter to Francesco Gonzaga that Troche’s crime was to have revealed to the King of France the Borgias’ negotiations with Spain. As Troche was known to be pro-French he was now expendable and, with his intimate knowledge of Cesare’s affairs, positively dangerous.16 Cesare then compounded the effect of this act of terror by executing at dawn on the same day a leading Roman nobleman, Jacopo di Santa Croce, whose body was exposed on the bridge of Sant’Angelo. No explanation for the execution was given, but since he had been arrested with Cardinal Orsini and the others at the time of Sinigallia and confined with them to the Castel Sant’ Angelo the probable reason was that Cesare suspected him of conspiring with the Orsini against him.
For Lucrezia, knowing Cesare as she did, and well informed through the Este envoys at every court, the future seemed perilous. The Borgias, father and son, had been raising huge sums for the coming campaign. In secret consistory on 29 March, Alexander had created eighty new official posts to be sold to candidates at 760 ducats apiece. Cesare himself had set the rates for the new cardinals’ nomination. Driven on by the fear of being caught in the coming clash between France and Spain, the Borgias resorted to poisoning wealthy victims, a means which was, as Guicciardini admitted, an Italian rather than a Spanish custom. For this reason Italians were wont to attribute the deaths of prominent people to poison whereas they were usually down to some virulent fever caused by food poisoning; the number of cardinals who died during Alexander’s papacy did not proportionately exceed the average number of deaths under previous pontificates. Cesare’s normal method of disposing with enemies was the Spanish garrotte, or swift strangulation. The method now used was probably cantarella, white arsenic, and one case – the death on 10 April of Cardinal Giovanni Michiel, Bishop of Porto and Patriarch of Constantinople – was almost certainly the result of deliberate poisoning. As soon as Alexander heard of his death, Giustinian reported, he had Michiel’s house plundered. ‘The death of this Cardinal gives him more than 150,000 ducats.’ In early July, Alexander issued a Bull conferring the vicariate of Vitellozzo Vitelli’s Città di Castello on Cesare and requested the Perugians to offer him their lordship in place of the Baglioni. Negotiations with the always impecunious Emperor Maximilian for the investiture for Cesare of Lucca, Pisa and Siena were well under way. Everyone north of Rome expected some lightning move by Cesare but as July wore into August, il Valentino had still not made a move. In reality, the ‘son of Fortune’ was in an agony of suspense. In Gaeta the French, under Cesare’s old companion-in-arms Yves d’Alègre, still held out against the Spaniards while in Lombardy a large French force was massing to march south to the rescue.
By mid July, as Cesare waited in Rome, the romance between Bembo and Lucrezia became ever more intense, on the poet’s side at least. He was in Ferrara, as ardent as ever and, it would appear, led on by Lucrezia:
I rejoice that each day to increase my fire you cunningly devise some fresh incitement, such as that which encircled your glowing brow today [presumably a jewelled head ornament perhaps representing flames]. If you do such things because, feeling some little warmth yourself, you wish to see another burn, I shall not deny that for each spark of yours untold Etnas [Bembo’s first printed work was entitled De Aetna] are raging in my breast. And if you do so because it is natural for you to relish another’s suffering, who in all justice could blame me if he but knew the reasons for my ardour? Truly I can do no sin if I put my faith in such a gospel and in so many miracles. Let Love wreak just revenge for me, if upon your brow you are not the same as in your heart.17
Four days later, on the verge of leaving Ferrara, he was still burning with passion: ‘I am leaving, oh my dearest life, and yet I do not leave and never shall . . . If likewise you who stay were not to stay, I dare not speak for you, but truly “Ah, of all who love none more blest than I!” . . . All this long night, whether in dreams or laying awake, I was with you . . .’ He entreated her to read Gli Asolani which he was leaving with her and to discuss it with ‘my dear and saintly Lisabetta’. ‘My heart kisses Your Ladyship’s hand which so soon I shall come to kiss with these lips that are forever forming your name . . .’ After their parting, he could not resist one final note: ‘Not because I am able to tell you what tender bitterness enfolds me at this parting do I write to you, light of my life, but only to entreat you to cherish yourself most dearly . . .’18
After he left, Lucrezia, whom he had suspected was unwell w
hen he left Ferrara, suffered two bouts of tertian fever but recovered sufficiently to charm Ariosto who was, Bembo told her, ‘deeply inflamed by Your Ladyship’s surpassing qualities, indeed all afire’. Apparently she had also praised his Gli Asolani both in a letter to him and to Ariosto: ‘Messer Lodovico [Ariosto] writes to me saying that he feels there is no need for it [Gli Asolani] to be brought out and read by all the world in order to gain glory, for more than it enjoys already could never come its way . . .’19 By early August he was back in Ferrara, very sick with fever and too ill to visit Lucrezia who bravely did him the signal honour of visiting his bedside and spending what he described as ‘a long while’ with him. ‘For the truth is your visit has altogether dispelled every trace of my grievous illness . . . and that vision alone and the merest pressure on my wrist had been enough to bring back all the health I had before. But to this you appended those dear sweet words so full of love and joy and the very quick of sympathy.’20
Even as Pietro Bembo wrote this, Lucrezia was about to face the most dangerous crisis of her life. On 11 August, her father had celebrated the eleventh anniversary of his elevation to the papacy but observers noted that he was far from in his usual spirits. He had been greatly depressed by the death on 1 August from fever (probably malaria) of his nephew Cardinal Juan Borgia-Lanzuol, Archbishop of Monreale (known as Juan Borgia ‘the elder’ to distinguish him from his younger brother of the same name). The cardinal had been excessively corpulent and as his funeral procession passed below the windows of the Vatican, Alexander, thinking of his own heavy body, had remarked, ‘This month is fatal for fat men.’ August was indeed a dangerous month to be in Rome – three of Alexander’s predescessors, Calixtus, Pius II and Sixtus IV, had died in the month of August and Innocent VIII at the end of July – and the August of 1503 was exceptionally hot. Alexander had remained in Rome because of the difficulties of the political situation, with Gaeta still holding out and a huge French force nearing Rome. Normally the papal court would have left the city for the cool of the Alban hills and to escape the threat of malaria perniciosa borne by the mosquitoes bred in the swamps of the Roman Campagna and the Tiber itself. The sickness struck without warning, accompanied by vomiting and bouts of fever which could raise a man’s temperature in a few hours to over 106 degrees Fahrenheit. On Saturday 12 August, Alexander was seized with a fit of vomiting and fever; Cesare, who had been planning to leave Rome on the 9th to try to come to terms with the French, fell ill the same day with the same symptoms.
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