The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  Suddenly the goldsmith pauses, crayon in air. A subtle change in the light has caught his practiced eye. He turns toward the Borgo, where the Castel Sant’Angelo stands with its back to the river. A thick fog is beginning to rise from the marshes.

  “If this mist continues to rise, the Imperials will soon be invisible to the Pope’s falconets,” he tells his friend. “It will give them all the cover they need. Dio, I fear this victory may be turning to defeat before our eyes.”

  A sinister quiet has fallen over the battle scene. Cellini, ever curious, wriggles his way up onto the parapet which supports two of Renzo’s arquebusiers. Cautiously, he raises himself on his haunches between them and peers down. The thick fog has created an indistinct blur of bodies. From the gray mass below, a commanding voice rings out. “God has manifested Himself to us, men. He has covered us over. Up the ladders once again! Follow me! This time we cannot fail.”

  “It’s the Bourbon traitor,” Cellini shouts, and grabbing an arquebus from one of the astonished gunners, he aims at the clearest target he can find: a human form that looms up over the top of the wall, so camouflaged by the fog that it appears as nothing more than a floating, ghostly-white surcoat.

  Cellini shoots.

  The figure falls backward, hit.

  Then comes a wailing and an outpouring of curses from the other side. Cellini peers down for a look. He can just make out a still figure on the ground, surrounded by a crowd of Imperial soldiers gesticulating wildly.

  “He is dead. The Constable is dead.” An anguished voice rises out of the mist.

  “Dead . . . dead . . . dead . . .” The word echoes in the stillness.

  “Dio!” Agile as a monkey, the goldsmith jumps down from the parapet and lands beside del Bene. “I have killed Constable Bourbon, Alessandro,” he announces, his voice quivering with pride and excitement. “I, Benvenuto Cellini, have killed the Imperial army.”

  But the Imperial monster does not die so easily. Like Hydra, the moment one of its heads is lopped off, others spring up to take its place. Out of the fog, young Ferrante Gonzaga materializes to lead the charge anew. The death of their leader has inspirited the Imperials. Spurred on by Ferrante’s exhortations to avenge their leader, they hurl themselves once more at the ladders. This time, they reach the top unimpeded. Then, slowly, one by one, they drop through the fog and down into the Borgo like wraiths from heaven.

  Renzo is the first of the defenders to spot the ghostly cadre. Are these men or the shades of men? Terror-stricken by what he takes to be an invasion of spirits, he begins to shout like a madman that all is lost and every man must save himself.

  In his private chapel, the Pope is “harvesting prayers,” as his historian Giovio puts it, refusing to accept the fact that the Imperial army has broken through at San Spirito and is headed directly for him. Over his protests he is dragged out onto the balcony and forced to look down into the streets of the Borgo. All he can see is the thick fog that God has sent to nourish his enemies and punish him. But his ears tell him the tale his eyes cannot comprehend — screams of alarm, cries of rape, supplications to God, vilifications of priests, of Roma, of himself, and steadily louder and louder, the zzzip, zzzip of deadly arquebus shafts.

  Time is running out. Giovio propels his master, compliant now and sobered by the pitiful sounds below, to the walkway that will lead them to safety in Sant’Angelo. The Pope’s escape is so narrow that, as one Spanish cardinal has it, had he tarried for three creeds more, he would have been taken prisoner in his own palace.

  Thank God for old Borgia, who built this passage for himself in case of just such an extremity. He knew something the Medici never understood: that it is as easy for a pontiff to be hated as to be loved.

  It occurs to Giovio that should any one of the landsknechts happen to look up and see, through the fog, the unmistakable white-clad figure of the Pope, it would present a tempting target. He throws his purple cape and hood over the Pontiff. No longer identifiable, Clement is now merely another refugee fleeing from the spawn born of Habsburg pride and Lutheran hatred.

  In the Borgo, chaos. The Swiss fight to the last man. But most of Renzo’s citizen-soldiers throw down their weapons and rush to join the exodus from the Borgo. Cellini has forecast accurately: the victory at San Spirito has turned into a rout.

  Using Alessandro del Bene’s body like a battering ram, Cellini is trying to force his way through the mob that jams the streets leading to the Castel Sant’Angelo. But the young nobleman pulls back, his mind still fixed on the idea of defending his palace.

  “Forget your goods, think of your life, man!” Cellini exhorts him. Using their combined strength, they force their way to the gate of Castel Sant’Angelo just in time to see the castellan emerge and order the portcullis lowered.

  “Jump, friend!” Cellini propels del Bene onto the drawbridge as it pulls up, and together they leap under the descending grillwork of the portcullis, which closes behind them with a reverberating clang. Safe!

  Fat Cardinal Armellino is not so fortunate. He delayed too long defending his palace against looters and now arrives breathless to find himself locked out.

  “Let me come in.” He raises his hands imploringly.

  The Pope, who has seemed to be in some sort of daze since his arrival at the fort, is now aroused by the sight of the flapping red sleeves waving out their distress signal.

  “Lower a basket,” he instructs his captain, Pallone dei Medici. Even in this extremity he refuses to abandon his friend.

  “But surely they will not harm him, not in his cardinal’s robe, Holiness,” the captain expostulates.

  “I would not wager on it,” Clement replies, for once a pessimist and for once accurate in his assessment of the situation. “Lower the basket.”

  Pallone calls two of his men away from their posts to handle the basket. Watching this most unlikely deus ex machina jerk its way down the rough curved wall, Giovio the historian mutters, “Even Attila the Hun respected bishops.”

  His honor in shreds, Renzo da Ceri drags his reluctant feet down the Capitol hill to the Sistine bridge. With the day not half over, the Borgo is lost and the Imperials have overwhelmed neighboring Trastevere. Now they are preparing to hack their way through the three hundred knights gathered at the Ponte Sisto, who represent all that is left of the city’s defense. They are men of heroic stripe, many carrying in their minds the image of Horatius facing the Etruscan hordes, and are ready to defend this last bridge to the death.

  With these survivors of the age of chivalry Renzo finally finds his place. He may have lacked the will to destroy this bridge, but he does not lack the courage to fight for it.

  In the corridors of the Colonna Palace, while the babies squall and the mothers moan and certain gentlemen try to hide the trembling of their limbs, Madonna Isabella d’Este makes certain for the tenth time that day that her citadel is impregnable.

  The thick wooden doors have been bolted for hours. Her mercenaries are deployed along the north-facing loggia, with a second layer stationed at the windows of the rooms in the piano nobile. These men are far from the company her guests are accustomed to keeping, but she has heard no complaint from the occupant of any room in which a bombardiste is stationed.

  To Madonna Isabella, this is the time of greatest trial. For hours now, a blanket of fog has cut off her view from the top of Nero’s tower. But her nose tells her that this mist is at least partly compounded of smoke — an ominous sign. Defending armies do not set fire to their own cities.

  “It is always best to prepare oneself for the worst,” she counsels her young companion. “So let us make the worst case: that the Borgo is taken, that the Tiber has been crossed, and that the Imperials are already streaming through the streets of Roma grabbing what they can where they can, as soldiers do. My honorable nephew Bourbon is too experienced a commander to permit them to sack the town until they have
their position secured. Rest assured there will be no looting tonight.”

  Danilo intuits that she is speaking more to herself than to him and does not reply, but merely nods companionably.

  “My honorable nephew promised to come to us within hours of the fall of the city,” she continues. “If this smoke we smell presages that catastrophe, a troop of his men will arrive here to reinforce our own bravi before midnight and to watch over us once his troops are let loose to loot the city. So even if the worst has come to pass and Roma has fallen to the Imperials, we have nothing to fear, do you understand?”

  “I do, madonna,” Danilo answers. “But I cannot say the same for those people in there.” He points in the direction of the palace behind them.

  “I know. I know,” she cuts him off. “But sad to say, not all men are brave, Danilo.”

  “Nor all women beautiful,” he adds, bringing a smile to her harried countenance.

  By midnight the drunken songs of the marauding soldiers are clearly audible to the inhabitants of the Colonna Palace and the acrid smell of gunpowder and burning buildings has begun to sting the linings of their nostrils. At two hours before midnight a basket was lowered into the Piazza S.S. Apostoli to give entrance to a Spanish officer, Don Alonso de Cordova, dispatched by Madama’s son Ferrante to inform his mother that her nephew Bourbon is dead and that with his dying breath the Constable gave orders that the Colonna Palace was to be protected even at the sacrifice of lives.

  For two hours now the Spaniard has sat listening courteously to the lady’s recollections of Bourbon’s youth, of his mother, Chiara, of the happy times they spent together at her favorite villa, Marmirolo. But his patience has run out. It is time for business. However, Cordova is bound by orders and honor to await the arrival of Captain Ferrante Gonzaga, the lady’s son.

  At last the young man arrives and is hauled up in the same ignominious basket as the Spaniard. Now he can take up the task of comforting his mother and leave Cordova to get on with the true purpose of his visit.

  But no. First there must be a reunion. This mother and son have not laid eyes on each other since he set off for Madrid to serve at the Imperial court of Charles V three years ago. In place of the dashing young cavaliere she waved off then, Isabella now welcomes back a gaunt and haggard man smelling of blood and gunpowder who looks several years older than his twenty years. But in his heart he remains his mother’s loyal son and is overcome with embarrassment at the role he is about to play.

  Cordova opens the subject with a blunt demand for one hundred thousand ducats.

  “And in what cause, sir, am I expected to contribute one hundred thousand ducats?” Isabella inquires icily.

  “For your ransom, señora,” the Spaniard replies, equally frigid but with a smile. “Roma is a captive city. You and your” — he waves his arm in a great arc to indicate the numerous guests she has taken in — “friends are the spoils of war.”

  Whatever treatment she may have expected from her rescuers, this is not it. “Ferrante! Do you hear this fellow?” she demands of her fidgeting and uncomfortable son.

  “I do, Madonna Madre.” All the courage he displayed this day at the barricades dissolves at the sight of her anger.

  “Then why do you not remind him that he is here as the representative of my dead nephew, cut down in his cause this very day and leaving him with orders to protect me?”

  “We will protect you, señora,” the Spaniard cuts in smoothly, “but for a price.”

  This Spaniard is not making Ferrante’s task easier. But the young man gamely takes up the challenge of explaining to his outraged mother why it is necessary for her to pay ransom to her own son.

  “It is the men, the soldiers, Madonna Madre,” he stammers, every minute more the erring boy and less the cool captain. “They have followed us here with the expectation that we will assess the ransoms available in this palace and exact them. If they do not get what they feel is coming to them, they will sack and burn this place as they are doing at this moment all over the city.”

  “You have that little control over them?” she asks.

  He nods, silent and ashamed.

  “If what you say is true, if these barbarians really do answer to no one or nothing but their own bestiality, then I thank God my poor dead nephew did not live to see this day,” is his mother’s impassioned reply. But the Spaniard will have no traffic with rhetoric.

  “It was your poor dead nephew, señora, who drove these men on with the promise that they would collect their pay, now owing to them for more than six months of hunger and cold and betrayal — that they would collect all that was owed them and more when they reached Roma. Constable Bourbon gave them Roma, señora, Roma with all of its treasures. Unfortunately, you are one of those treasures.”

  “I fear, Madonna Madre, that your generosity has proven your undoing.” Her son takes up the argument. “It is reported in the camp that more than two millions in valuables are concealed in this palace. Your hospitality has made you not only a prize but a glittering prize. Believe me, madonna, ransom is far preferable to a sack of the palace. Let each of your guests pay what they are assessed, and out of the money collected we will engage a cadre of stout and loyal men to stand guard over you. And when the violence ends three days from now, those bravi will accompany you out of this city to the sea and safety.”

  It is scandalous, of course. Unconscionable and wickedly opportunistic. Isabella plays her outrage to the hilt. Again and again she turns to her son, at times imploring, at others demanding. But her game is up and she knows it. By dawn, it is tacitly agreed that ransoms will be paid.

  A table is set up in a vault behind the kitchens, covered with green baize and equipped with a small weighing scale. Seeing it, Grazia is reminded of the table she sat behind in her father’s banco. The difference is that here the banchieri are two high-ranking officers in the Imperial army and one dowager marchesana.

  Now a long line of clients forms outside this bizarre banco to make their offerings to the unlikely banchieri. Isabella fights the Spaniard on every case. She wins some small victories but for the most part her guests must pay with every ducat they can raise, every jewel, and indeed every valuable thing they own. For some an armed escort is provided so that the client can retrieve assets he or she has hidden away and bring them back safely to the palace.

  By the end of the first day so much treasure has piled up that the assessors, threatened with suffocation in the packed vault, are forced to move to larger quarters. There the assessing goes on as before, slow, methodical, tedious — in striking contrast to the scenes in the streets outside, which by now have begun quite literally to run red with blood.

  The three allowable “days of violence” come and go, but there is no cessation to the savagery. In vain the Prince of Orange, who has fallen into leadership of the unruly force by default, sends his heralds through the streets to announce the end of the sack. He might as well have blown his trumpets into deaf ears. The landsknechts continue to kill every priest or nun they lay their hands on and to loot every church, convent, and monastery.

  In the whole city there appears to be not a single person who does not have to purchase his safety, babies and infants excepted because, whenever found, they are simply tossed out of high windows to splatter on the street below in view of their horrified mothers. Whereupon the mothers themselves are forced to copulate with pigs — a favorite entertainment of the Germans — or are driven through the sewers naked to forage for treasure that the crafty Romans are reputed to have buried in human excrement — a favored diversion of the more gold-oriented Spaniards.

  These are the scenes that greet the eyes of Captain Ferrante Gonzaga as he rides dutifully across Roma every morning to play his role of banchiere to his mother’s guests and incidentally to beg her to let him spirit her away to a safe place outside the city. But Isabella remains firm. She will not leave the p
alace until every soul she had taken under her protection is released at a place beyond the walls where they will have a reasonable hope of safety.

  “I have promised these people my protection,” she reminds him. “You know, my son,” she chides gently, “men are not the only creatures who hold their honor more closely than their lives. We women too are jealous of our word.”

  Not for the first time Ferrante wishes that he had not been blessed with the prima donna del mondo as his mother.

  For her own part, Isabella confides in Grazia, she would gladly have run into the arms of the devil if he offered to lead her out of this hell. But honor holds her at the bargaining table trading lives for gems and ducats. She spends her evenings with Grazia who, to keep her own sanity, has begun to lead her son on a voyage along Herodotus’s winding paths.

  To the two women and the boy the Room of the Fishes has become a sanctuary of learning where they can wrap themselves in the cocoon of the past and there find peace and comfort.

  “I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my history,” Grazia hears with pleasure the still-reedy voice of her son translating from the ancient tongue. “So that the great deeds of men may not be forgotten, whether they be Greeks or foreigners and especially to show the causes of war between them . . .”

  As Madonna Isabella never tires of pointing out, no one who collects books and reads them is ever totally bereft of comfort.

  62

  May 10, 1527

  The last prayer offered in the Sistine Chapel before the Imperials entered Roma on the seventh day of May was a plea to God to save His city, offered by a pope with tears running down his cheeks. Since that day, the strains of Kyrie and Agnus Dei have given place to the dissonant neighing of the Prince of Orange’s horse. The Prince has chosen to stable his horse in the chapel next to his new headquarters in the Pope’s private apartments in order to prevent the animal from being stolen. There it stands tethered at the foot of Perugino’s ideal city, gazing up at Michelangelo’s Adam, the first man, at the moment of his release from the hands of God.