SIXTEEN
As luck would have it, Rodrigo Borgia had been elected pope in August 1492, the same month that Columbus set off on his voyage of discovery. It was only the second time in history that a Spaniard had been named to the church’s highest office, and his tenure was to be memorable in many ways.
It started with the most sumptuous pontifical ceremony that veteran Vatican-watchers had ever seen. Thirteen contingents of men in armor marched in procession, commanded by the mercenary soldiers known as condottieri. Next came the households of the cardinals in brightly colored uniforms. The cardinals themselves promenaded on horseback, wearing their miters and silken robes. Twelve white horses, conducted at the bridle by twelve handsome youths, preceded the pope. Shops and homes along the parade route were decked in colorful banners; cannons were fired in thundering celebration; frenzied crowds roared “Borgia, Borgia” to welcome the new pontiff.
Borgia made his way by horse or mule from the Vatican Palace to St. Peter’s Basilica, taking a seat in a gilded chair while court officials came forward to kiss his feet. Then he climbed to the Chapel of St. Andrew and positioned himself on St. Peter’s golden throne. The triple crown of the pope was placed on his head.
Borgia had the highest expectations for his pontificate. He had taken the name of the great Greek conquerer, styling himself Alexander VI. And he was ecstatic. “It was said he put on the papal vestments with an almost childish enthusiasm,” writes one historian.1
Not everyone in Europe shared this enthusiasm. Already rumors were circulating that the process of selecting the pope had been more secular than spiritual—that Borgia’s election had been the result of blatant bribery of the other cardinals, with gifts and church benefices changing hands in exchange for secure votes. Four stout mules had reportedly been needed to move treasure from Borgia’s home to that of a key swing vote, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, who was promptly named to the prestigious post of vice-chancellor of the church.
Buying the papal tiara, if that was what he had done, was not unique to Borgia, however. The purchase of high ecclesiastical office was frowned upon but nevertheless endemic in the Vatican of the Renaissance. It was a world where earthly rewards paid for spectacular pomp and display, and where clerics racked up benefices to enable themselves to indulge in ostentatious shows of wealth.
Some of this wealth was poured into the creation of great artworks to glorify God. On a commission from Pope Sixtus IV, Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio had created frescoed panels depicting the life of Moses for the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Cardinal Jean de Bilhères de Lagraulas paid Michaelangelo to chisel Jesus and Mary in marble, the poignant Pietà. The family of Cardinal Sforza paid for Leonardo da Vinci’s rendition of Christ’s Last Supper. But the more elevated the physical manifestations of spirituality on Vatican Hill became, it sometimes seemed, the lower the moral quality of its inhabitants.
Church corruption was not new. Decades earlier, in 1458, after Calixtus III, Rodrigo’s uncle Afonso de Borgia, died, politicking had been rife as well. Cardinal Enea Silvio Piccolomini met with then-young Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia in the Vatican latrines at dawn, and Borgia told him he had pledged to give his vote to the French cardinal Guillaume d’Estouteville in exchange for a written promise that he could keep his lucrative post as vice-chancellor of the Vatican. Piccolomini told Rodrigo that he was a “young fool,” and that Guillaume’s promise was worth less than the paper it was written on. Guillaume’s loyalties would be to his fellow Frenchmen in the College of Cardinals, he told Borgia; by voting for him, Borgia would end up losing the vice-chancellorship and damaging the church to boot. The next day Borgia shifted his vote to Piccolomini, who had gathered the other necessary votes. Piccolomini assumed the papal tiara as Pope Pius II, and Rodrigo retained his vice-chancellorship and became the elder cleric’s favored protégé.
In the next thirty-four years, as three more popes wore the Ring of the Fisherman, Rodrigo prospered. When Pius II died, Rodrigo was again fortunate: his friend Pietro Barbo, who had stayed with him during the anti-Spanish rioting when Calixtus died, becamePope Paul II. Rodrigo had been ill during the consistory in which Pietro Barbo was chosen, but his longtime alliance with the future pope left him in good stead nonetheless.
Two more popes had followed—Sixtus IV, the one who sent Rodrigo to Spain as a papal legate when he had proved so helpful to Isabella and Ferdinand; and then Innocent VIII, who had served as the Holy Father from 1484 to 1492. As Innocent VIII lay dying, he bemoaned the woeful state of the church and told the cardinals gathered around his deathbed that he bitterly regretted that he had himself been such a disappointment. His pious views were noted, but his change of heart came too late to correct the ruinous course of events he had set in motion by urging investigations into witchcraft in northern Europe, selling ecclesiastical posts to the highest bidders, and inviting King Charles VIII, with the assurance of papal support, to invade Italy and take possession of the Kingdom ofNaples.
During those years when he was a high-ranking functionary, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia had continued to perform as a trusted official of the Catholic Church, known for his intelligence, perceptiveness, and diligence in performing his assigned tasks. He was also notable for his adroit maneuvering within the Vatican, and his steady accumulation of lucrative church benefices and posts. Rodrigo was given the bishoprics of Albano, Porto, Valencia, Cartagena, and Majorca. He had possessions in Italy, too, including Nepi, Civita Castellana, and Soriano, strongholds controlling the Via Cassia and Via Flamina, main arteries to the north of Rome. In 1482, he received the rights to the revenues generated by the Abbey of Subiaco, which controlled twenty-two villages. He similarly received the revenues from the Abbey of Fossanova, on the route to Naples. This meant that he controlled key properties on the entry and exit roads to the north and south of Rome.
Some of his expanding empire of benefices came to him with the blessing of King Ferdinand of Aragon. Valencia, Cartagena, and Majorca were all parts of Ferdinand’s dominions. Then with Ferdinand’s acquiescence, Rodrigo became the first archbishop of Valencia, when the city was elevated to a higher ecclesiastic status.
Rodrigo’s rise at the Vatican occurred in parallel with that of his countrymen back home in Spain, whose prestige was growing almost daily. The conquest of Granada was viewed throughout Europe as the most significant military achievement of Christian forces in centuries. It was even viewed as partial compensation for the loss of the great Christian capital of Constantinople. Rodrigo Borgia had played up those associations to the hilt, staging an elaborate celebration in the streets of Rome when Isabella and Ferdinand completed the seven-hundred-year-long Reconquest in January 1492: “The event was celebrated in Rome by illuminations and bonfires and diversions of every kind, including a bull fight, in which five bulls were slain, the first entertainment of its kind that had ever been seen in Rome, and which was the special contribution of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia.”2
The resounding victory in Granada was no small thing for Cardinal Borgia, because the Italians who predominated in the church hierarchy were disposed to look upon foreigners with contempt. Rodrigo’s high position left him vulnerable to criticism as an outsider, and he valued his ties and support from home. Spain’s increased prestige increased his own as well.
But the relationship between Rodrigo Borgia and the Spanish sovereigns had encountered some stumbling blocks. When Isabella heard about Rodrigo’s rise to the papal tiara in the early fall of 1492, she was conflicted. Borgia was a subject of theirs, which was of course advantageous to Ferdinand and Isabella, and she knew him personally. He had helped her obtain the throne, and she had reason to be grateful to him. He started off on a good note, promising to reform the church and cleanse Rome of its rampant street crime. Taking a leaf from Isabella’s playbook, he initiated a thorough search for gang leaders and murderers, and when wrongdoers were apprehended, they were promptly hanged until dead, their bodies left rotting on the gallows along the Tiber River.3 He also proposed some important reconstruction work in the now-faded capital of the Roman Empire. He built a roadway, the Via Alessandrina (later called the Borgo Nuovo), to make a grand approach from Castel Sant’Angelo to St. Peter’s and the Vatican.4 He also initiated somebeautification projects at the holiest of Rome’s shrines, something Isabella warmly applauded.
But Isabella also had some serious concerns about Pope Alexander VI’s morality and fitness for a post of such importance. Publicly she and Ferdinand expressed pleasure at the news of his elevation, but privately they indicated their reservations. According to the Italian humanist Peter Martyr, who had worked at the Vatican before moving to Castile to join Isabella’s court, the sovereigns feared that although Rodrigo was brilliant and had great potential for good, he also demonstrated troubling character flaws and possessed ferocious ambition in seeking to advance the fortunes of his many illegitimate children. To Martyr, the parentage of the children, who were becoming young adults, was undisputed. He referred specifically to Borgia’s sons in numerous letters over more than a decade, and his opinion was shared by others in the pope’s inner circle in the Vatican.
“There is no movement of the mind in my Sovereigns for joy on account of this thing, no serenity of brow,” Peter Martyr wrote soon after Borgia had been named pope. “They seem to foretell rather a tempest in the Christian world than tranquil ports and they are more grieved because he basely boasts that he has sacrilegious children than [glad] because he is a subject of theirs. They suspect that there will be a disruption of Peter’s tiara.” But they would hope for the best, he wrote: “If perchance Christian charity should overcome the paternal power of nature he will establish a bridge to heaven for all Christians stronger than a pillar of stone.… God grant that we may hear that he has turned his ability, in which he very much abounds, to the better part.”5
To his friends in Rome, Peter Martyr expressed concern about the rumors circulating that Rodrigo had paid bribes to secure the papacy, something Martyr feared would injure the Christian faith if it were to be exposed. “Someone has whispered in my ear… base, sacrilegious and criminal things, as that your patron had built the steps to that height of affairs not by letters or continence or fervor of charity, but that he has made himself a ladder of gold and silver and great promises,” he wrote to Franciscus Pratensis Griolanus, a friend of the pope. “If that is so, this ladder is placed against the walls of Paradise, so that Christ may be thrown down, not worshipped, for the acquiring of glory.” Moreover, the balance of power in Italy and Europe could be upset if Rodrigo persisted in his “insane desire to raise his sons to the highest.”6
Peter Martyr took the extraordinary step of expressing his concerns to one of the men alleged to have benefited most directly from Borgia’s bounty, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, a childhood friend of Martyr’s from Milan who had supported Borgia’s campaign for the papacy and was raised by him to the position of vice-chancellor.
But take this, Most Illustrious Prince, that my Sovereigns are neither pleased at the death of Pope Innocent [n]or that the Pontificate should have come to Alexander, although their subject. For they fear lest his greed, his ambition, and what is worse his softness toward his children should drag the Christian church headlong. Nor are you free from a mark because you are said to have helped the man to be raised.… May God turn it well and grant that he may keep a grateful mind toward you and your family.7
Similar concerns were being raised by idealistic and pious Christians across Europe, who believed that the church was becoming dangerously corrupt and that the secular power of the papacy was growing. Many deeply devout Spaniards, including Isabella, were disturbed by this state of affairs. She was doing much to try to elevate the morals and standards of the Catholic Church in Spain, so it was particularly disheartening to see serious misconduct at the apex of the church hierarchy in Rome.
Isabella’s ambassador to the Vatican, the Castilian Bernardino López de Carvajal, had been invited to address the assembled cardinals for Holy Mass on August 6, 1492, as the men entered the conclave to choose the new pope. He used the opportunity to deliver a fiery sermon on what he saw as a spiritual crisis in the church and the need to select an upstanding man to replace Pope Innocent VIII:
It is fallen, it is fallen, that glorious majesty of the Church of Rome, which used to stand so high!… At the present time, we are suffering from even deeper wounds. These vices expose us to the disobedience of our inferiors, to the contempt of peoples and princes, to the mockeries and plunder of the Turks; for while we are engaged in our pleasures, our ambitions and our cupidities, the majesty of the ecclesiastical throne vanishes, and all vigilance of pastoral care is thrust aside.
He called for the election of a pontiff who would lead and inspire, holy enough to perform what he said would be “little short of a miracle to lift the Church from so deep a ruin, almost from a dunghill.”8
One particular concern was that cardinalships and other high church positions were being filled by relatives of powerful prelates, nobles, and kings, not by learned people with a true religious vocation. These coveted posts generated substantial amounts of revenue, without a specific requirement that the holder perform any work on behalf of parishioners. Many people who held high ecclesiastical offices therefore never even bothered to set foot in the dioceses given to their care. Previous efforts had been made to stop this plague of nepotism. In 1458, for example, the cardinals gathered in the conclave had attempted to use the passing of Pope Pius II as an occasion for improving and cleansing church administration. They gave almost unanimous support to a petition that called for structural changes at the Vatican. Every cardinal promised that, if he were elected, he would institute specific reforms. The pledge called for the Sacred College of Cardinals to be limited to twenty-four members, so as to give each of them a greater voice. It called for a ban on appointing cardinals younger than thirty and those who were uneducated. It limited each pope to naming only one nephew as cardinal. It called for the pope to govern more democratically, requiring him to seek approval from the College of Cardinals before entering into political alliances or disposing of church property. It required a promise to make war on the Turks. It was agreed that soon after the election, the new pope would announce this pledge and all that it entailed.
But these pledged reforms were never enacted. When Rodrigo’s friend Pietro Barbo was elected pope, taking the name Paul II, his first act was to quietly repudiate the pledge. In exchange for retaining the power held by the pope, however, he upgraded the cardinals in status. He ordered them to wear silken robes that were red, the most costly color of dye. He ordered them to travel with corps of retainers, and he made sure that those who had limited funds received payments from the church to boost their incomes. He in essence transformed them into princes of the church. This new emolument made the repudiation of the pledge more palatable to the Sacred College, but it also accentuated the perception of unseemly clerical worldliness and avarice. Then Paul II named three of his nephews as cardinals.
The role of nephews in the Vatican was particularly vexing. Being pope was a difficult job, typically undertaken by a man in advanced years, and new pontiffs naturally would want some people standing at their side who had only their best interests at heart. Aging people typically turn to their adult children to perform that role. In the presumptive absence of children, nephews were the next best thing. But many of the nephews who got appointed were simple loyalists that the church supported in luxury, having little apparent religious calling.
Several popes in fact had children of their own, but usually they had been born before the men joined the priesthood, or they had died before the cleric assumed a high-visibility position. Innocent VIII had two illegitimate children, conceived before he entered the clergy. Others may have had children but discreetly concealed their parentage by calling them nephews or cousins.
Concealing the existence of children was considered necessary because one of the key tenets of advancement in Christian leadership was the vow of celibacy. In the early church, almost all clerics had been married men. Christ is believed to have been unmarried, but most of his apostles had wives. As the Roman Catholic Church grew wealthier, however, celibacy was required in the belief that it represented an institutionalized disdain for earthly pleasures and made it easier for clerics to concentrate on the work at hand. It also ensured that the church could maintain better control of its financial resources, without fear that funds would be siphoned off for the children of church officials.
Once Rodrigo Borgia became pope, however, a group of about a half dozen young people emerged in close association with him. These young adults have attracted avid attention among generations of historians. Rodrigo himself was mysterious on the subject of their parentage. Some scholars have chosen to believe that they were his nieces and nephews. To the Spanish, however, their parentage was no secret and unquestionable. Rodrigo’s growing brood of illegitimate children were not concealed to them because he was busy seeking positions of wealth and power for them in Spain. No one is sure exactly how many there were, or how old they were, or who their mothers were, but certainly there was a crew of young people over whom he kept a careful eye, and whose advancement he seemed to value as his own.
They were remarkably attractive children, beautiful and intelligent, and perhaps it proved impossible for Rodrigo to forgo taking credit for their existence. They began making their appearance in society while Rodrigo was still a cardinal.
The one believed to be the eldest was named Pedro Luis, and Rodrigo was particularly eager to make a place for him. In May 1483 he provided him with 50,000 ducats to buy a fiefdom in Spain; that November Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull declaring that, in the eyes of the church, despite any possible questions about his parentage, Pedro’s birth was legitimate. His property and name secured, Pedro traveled to Spain when he was about twenty and joined the Spanish in the war against Granada. He served bravely at the siege of Ronda. At the end of 1485, Ferdinand gave the young man the prestigious title of Duke of Gandía, which included the right of hereditary transmission. A dukedom is the highest level of nobility, inferior only to kings and princes, and it was a valuable grant. The town of Gandía was delightful, beautifully laid out and located near the sea. Soon Pedro Luis built two imposing homes in Aragon, including one in Gandía and a city home in Valencia.
Moreover, King Ferdinand welcomed the young Borgia into his family, giving his approval for Pedro Luis to marry his young cousin, María Enríquez de Luna. The marriage couldn’t occur right away because María Enríquez was not yet of age, but this betrothal gave the Borgias a direct marital tie to the Spanish royal family.
Unfortunately the promising young man died on a vacation in 1488 while visiting his family in Italy. But there were heirs to spare back in Rome. The child next in line to assume Pedro’s estate and title was called Giovanni in Italy and Juan in Spain; Pedro Luis had named him as his beneficiary in his will. That meant that Juan would become the next Duke of Gandía.
There were at least three other youngsters. Cesare, handsome and sharp-witted, was destined for the priesthood, as was the custom for younger sons of noble families. By age six he was an apostolic protonotary; three months later he was named a canon of Valencia Cathedral, archdeacon of Játiva, and rector of Gandía. He was legitimized by Pope Sixtus in 1480. When his father became pope, young Cesare, then about sixteen, became archbishop of Valencia, which made him, theologically speaking, responsible for the pastoral care of everyone who lived in the province of Valencia and the Balearic islands of the Mediterranean.
A daughter Lucrezia, meanwhile, was noted for her sweet disposition and extraordinary beauty, with long, flowing golden hair and a graceful step to her walk. And there was at least one other son, a boy named Jofre.
But even the appearance of sexual immorality by clerics was anathema to Isabella. She was relentless in cleaning up corruption and nepotism within the Spanish Catholic Church, and she selected for her own religious advisers men of impeccable moral authority, chaste living, and asceticism. She had chosen as her personal confessor Hernán de Talavera, on the basis of his strict adherence to Christ-like simplicity and compassion, and when she completed her conquest of Granada, she elevated Talavera, who was from aconverso family, to the important new post of archbishop of Granada, charging him with the religious shepherding of a greatly expanded flock in Andalusia, and sent him to Granada to supervise the church’s progress there.
To replace him as her confessor, she chose a hermitic former monk named Cisneros, who traveled from place to place by foot, begging for bread to eat, a practice dating from the earliest mendicant traditions. The prelate wore a coarse undergarment designed to chafe his skin, known as a hair shirt, to remind himself of the sufferings of the church martyrs, slept at night on a wooden board, and was rumored to flagellate himself as punishment for his perceived sins and shortcomings. She asked Cisneros, who joined her court with the greatest reluctance, to govern her soul with the same diligence he did his own.
Not unsurprisingly, friction emerged between Isabella and Pope Alexander VI. Early on, she complained to his ambassador to her court, Francisco des Prats, that the pope was behaving immorally by ostentatiously flaunting his out-of-wedlock children. Francisco, a Catalan, told her that Alexander’s activities were not really out of the ordinary for recent popes. He reported their conversation back to the pope and told him that he had essentially told the queen that she was being naïve. “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 to Alexander.9
The marriage arrangements for the Borgia adolescents soon caused international complications. Lucrezia had been promised to first one and then another of two Catalan gentlemen. That second engagement was terminated in November 1492.10 With her father having won the papacy, bigger things were in store for Lucrezia now.
Another, more prestigious marriage was being arranged for her, this time with Giovanni Sforza, a minor prince of the important Sforza family of Milan. He was the lord of the pretty town of Pesaro, on the Adriatic Coast. The marriage negotiations were conducted with some secrecy because of the earlier nuptials that had been planned. Marriages of ranking nobility in Spain needed approval by the sovereigns, and King Ferdinand had given his official blessing to the previous match. Then the cast-off bridegroom inconveniently showed up in Rome, requiring the pope and the Duke of Milan to pay him off to go away.
Once that matter was tended to, however, wedding plans for the new match could proceed. The ceremony was held within the Vatican. The lovely bride, Lucrezia, arrived wearing a sumptuous gown, bedecked with shining jewels. She was accompanied into the hall by nineteen-year-old Giulia Farnese, the spectacularly beautiful woman who many observers believed to be the pope’s mistress. The groom wore a long robe made of golden cloth; Lucrezia’s brothers Cesare and Juan looked on. The pope and an Italiannobleman officiated at the wedding ceremony. The pair were feted at a banquet attended by church officials and Roman nobles. Isabella was not pleased with news that the elaborate wedding party had been held in the hallowed and sacred halls of the Vatican, and she again communicated her concerns to the pope.
The queen and the pope also differed on the question of heresy and the Jews. The pope thought Ferdinand and Isabella were being unreasonably harsh in their conduct of the Inquisition and in forcing Jews to convert or leave Spain. In Rome, Jews were allowed to settle freely and to maintain their faith if they did not practice it in public. A group of Jews who left Spain took up residence in a camp near the town of Cecilia Martella, under the protection of the pope.
The Spanish ambassador to the Vatican, Diego López de Haro, was irate when he learned the pope had decided to welcome the Spanish Jews: he insisted that as head of the church, Alexander should be the first to expel them. The pope disregarded him. Ferdinand did not believe this was a matter of kindness or humanity on the pope’s part. He said Alexander allowed them to stay only because he could make money out of them by charging them extra taxes. “His Holiness makes money out of everything he can sell!” Ferdinand snorted.11
Despite these differences, Isabella was not looking for a showdown. She had some important business to conduct with the pope, and for now, points of contention were set aside. As soon as she received word from Columbus about his discoveries, she set out to make certain that she would have sole right to whatever had been found. She forwarded Columbus’s letter to the pope, asking for a determination on the ownership of these islands, even before the Genoese arrived in her court. Isabella must have sent her request to the pope by swift messengers as soon as she got word of Columbus’s discoveries.
The astute pope immediately understood, as Isabella had, the significance of the discoveries and the need for prompt action. He also understood that he owed much to the Spaniards, and particularly to Ferdinand. In addition to the political cover and support they afforded him, Ferdinand had allowed Cardinal Borgia, before becoming pope, to hold three lucrative Aragonese bishoprics at the same time, had provided a document that legitimized the pope’s son Cesare, and had nominated young Cesare to the bishoprics of Pamplona and Valencia. Ferdinand then agreed to permit the teenager to further rise to the rank of archbishop in Valencia.
In 1493, early in his tenure, Pope Alexander was eager to similarly accommodate Isabella and promptly issued four bulls on the New World. (Bulls were legal documents stamped with a seal of lead, or bulla, giving them special authenticity and significance.) All four gave Isabella exactly what she had asked. According to the twentieth-century historian Samuel Eliot Morison:
Eager to square himself with his royal patrons, he practically let them dictate a series of papal bulls on the new discoveries, without considering the just claims of Portugal. These four bulls were not arbitrary decisions. They were acts of papal sovereignty in favor of Castile based on the Holy Father’s presumed right to dispose of newly discovered lands and heathen peoples not hitherto possessed or governed by any Christian princes.12
Three papal bulls concerning the discovery were issued on May 3 and 4, 1493, amazingly prompt for such formal documents, given that Christopher Columbus had arrived in Lisbon only two months earlier. Multiple copies of the bulls were made so that future explorers could display them to anyone who might be inclined to dispute the claims.
In the formal introductions of all four documents, the pope greeted both Ferdinand and Isabella, but interestingly, the bulls gave the discovered lands specifically to the rulers of “Castile and León,” meaning that the lands belonged to Isabella alone. Ferdinand, always quick to angle for personal advantage, must have thought that the new lands would prove to be relatively valueless; otherwise he would certainly have made sure that the documents gave him specific rights as well.
The bull dated May 4, 1493, known as Inter Caetera, neatly gave half the globe to Queen Isabella. This grant of papal sovereignty did
give, concede and assign… all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered towards west and south, [by] establishing and constituting one line from the Arctic pole, that is the north, to the Antarctic pole, that is the south, whether the mainlands and islands found and to be found are towards Indian or [toward] any other part whatever; which line shall be distant from any of the islands, which are commonly called the Azores and Cape Verde, one hundred leagues towards west and south,13
as long as the new lands were not possessed by any other Christian king.
Pope Alexander stressed, however, that these rights were granted in the expectation that religious evangelization was the primary object of the enterprise of discovery. He expected Ferdinand and Isabella to build upon their record of success in expanding Catholicism in Spain. Inter Caetera emphasized proselytizing as the justification for the territorial grant:
Among other works agreeable to the Divine Majesty and desirable to our heart this is truly the most important, that the Catholic Faith and the Christian religion, particularly in our times, shall be exalted and everywhere amplified and spread, [and] that the salvation of souls may be provided for and barbarous nations subjugated and brought to the very true faith. And whereas we are called to this Holy Seat of Saint Peter by the favour of Divine clemency, though not with like merits, and recognizing that you as true Catholic Kings and Princes, such as know that you have ever been, and as your famous deeds already well known to almost the entire world prove, not merely desired this, but with every possible effort study and diligence, sparing no labours, no expenses, no dangers, shedding even your own blood, are accomplishing it and have devoted to this aim already for a long time your entire mind and all your efforts, such as attests the recovery of the kingdom of Granada from the tyranny of the Saracens, achieved in these very times with such great glory to the Divine name. Justly we are induced and not undeservedly, and we ought even spontaneously and graciously to concede to you the means whereby you may be enabled to prosecute a purpose so sacred and praiseworthy and so agreeable to the immortal God with daily increasing fervor to the glory of God himself and the propagation of the Christian Empire.14
The pope wrote, in the same bull, that the colony that his “beloved son Christopher Columbus” had established in the New World, with “one sufficiently well fortified tower, in which he has placed certain Christians who had gone with him,” had begun the process of establishing the new empire.15 He was referring, of course, to the little community that Columbus had left behind when the Santa María ran aground.
The Portuguese, naturally, were not happy with the pope’s ruling on who had which rights to undiscovered lands. Isabella and King João of Portugal therefore negotiated their own division of the globe, in talks held in Castile, at the town of Tordesillas. The agreement they reached in June 1494, known as the Treaty of Tordesillas, pushed the north-to-south dividing line west to 370 leagues from the islands of Cape Verde, instead of the pope’s 100 leagues to the west, thereby allowing Portugal to retain all rights to the coast of Africa that Castile had already conceded. The Portuguese were pleased: they may have sent exploratory ships west as soon as Columbus came back in 1493 and found a large bulge of land in the east of the South American continent, present-day Brazil, which would now fall within their sphere. The resolution of the dispute, at least at this time, and from the perspective of Isabella and João, was that Spain now owned the western side of the new lands, and Portugal owned the southern section, which included both Brazil and the African coast. The two cousins had divided the cookie in half.
Now other parts of the world had to be apportioned as well. Ferdinand, for his part, wanted the pope to favor his Neapolitan relations to govern the Kingdom of Naples. At the time Rodrigo became pope, Ferdinand’s younger sister, Juana, was queen of Naples, married to their cousin, Ferrante, who was king. Rodrigo, in fact, had performed the wedding ceremony and coronation for them.16 The ruling families of Aragon and Naples, therefore, were closely linked and generally allies.
Naples was a very rich kingdom, heavily populated, with a spectacular physical setting; the kingdom’s holdings comprised the entire southern half of the Italian peninsula. Naples consequently played a huge role in Mediterranean commerce and was eyed with envy by a number of other European powers, including, most notably, France. The French believed they had a legitimate claim to the Kingdom of Naples because they had held the throne before it was taken by conquest by Alfonso the Magnanimous, Ferdinand’s uncle. The pope was being asked for a final determination on who the rightful king or queen should be. The previous pope, Innocent VIII, had feuded with Ferrante and decided he preferred King Charles VIII of France, which obviously created potential problems.
In addition, the ruling family of Milan, the Sforza clan, was also feuding with the family of King Ferrante of Naples. Ludovico Sforza added his encouragement to Charles VIII, telling him that if he invaded Italy and seized Naples, the Sforzas would help him. All this meant that pressures were mounting on the Neapolitan rulers, even as the new pope, Rodrigo Borgia, took office. King Ferrante of Naples and King Ferdinand of Aragon wanted to make sure the pope endorsed Ferrante’s continuing control of the realm.
To aid his cousins, Ferdinand made an offer that Alexander VI couldn’t refuse. In mid-year 1493, Diego López de Haro, the Spanish envoy to the Vatican, went to the papal court to offer his homage. In exchange for the pope’s support for the Aragonese claims to the throne of Naples, he was authorized to offer to permit Borgia’s son Juan to marry Ferdinand’s cousin María Enríquez de Luna. This was a great opportunity for the social-climbing Borgia clan. Alexander told his son Juan that he wanted this royal connection but was also hoping to obtain former Moorish estates in Granada from Queen Isabella, now or in the near future.17
There was another alliance-building nuptial proposition as well. The Neapolitan ruling family offered King Ferrante’s illegitimate granddaughter, Sancia, in marriage to the pope’s son Jofre, along with a generous dowry. It gave the pope yet another royal nuptial for his offspring, and the two teenagers were married in 1494.
In exchange, the pope gave Kings Ferdinand and Ferrante what they requested, which was continuing control of Naples in Trastámara family hands. When Ferrante died in early 1494, the pope announced that the crown would go to Ferrante’s son Alfonso, not to King Charles VIII of France. That decision, of course, angered both the French and the Milanese, who began to plot together to upend the pope’s decision and undermine his alliance with the House of Aragon.
The marriage between Juan Borgia and Ferdinand’s cousin María Enríquez was an extravagant and memorable affair, representing as it did the triumph of the Aragonese Borgia clan, who had now made good. Juan was sent with an entourage and presents worthy of a royal wedding. His father loaded him up with valuable merchandise to take to Spain, including “boxes and boxes of rich velvet, damask, brocade, cloth of silver, satin and furs… 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.” And there were jewels: a pendant with a huge emerald and a huge diamond for Juan to wear attached to his cap, and for the duchess, a golden cross studded with pearls and diamonds, encapsulating a piece of the True Cross, which had been placed there by the Holy Father himself.18
The ostentatiousness of the enterprise attracted much critical comment. “This Duke leaves very rich and loaded with jewels, money and other valuable portable goods and silver,” the Mantuan envoy reported. “It is said he will return within a year but leave all his goods in Spain and come back to reap another harvest.”19
When Juan married María Enríquez in September 1493, he became a cousin to King Ferdinand and a relation by marriage to the most elite families in Spain. But the young man behaved badly from the moment of his arrival. He drank prodigiously, gambled heavily, spent many hours in brothels, and entertained himself by such reprehensible pastimes as shooting dogs and cats for sport. His father even heard a disturbing report—which soon proved untrue—that his son had failed to consummate the marriage. In fact, his wife became pregnant twice in short order, giving him a son and a daughter.
Juan did not earn high marks among the Spaniards. “A very mean young man, full of false ideas of grandeur and bad thoughts, haughty, cruel and unreasonable,” one observer remarked.20 His conduct did not endear him to Ferdinand and Isabella either, and they did not protest when he was called home to Rome for a visit of undetermined duration. His wife, María Enríquez, stayed behind, raising the children on her own.
Meanwhile, the pope’s administration of the Vatican was making people angry. Alexander VI was facing outright rebellion from the College of Cardinals. In an effort to bolster his control over the group, he proposed an unprecedented thirteen new candidates for membership. Three were his secretaries, a fourth was Alessandro Farnese, brother of the beguiling Giulia, and a fifth was his own son Cesare. The existing cardinals objected strenuously, but the pope said he intended to make the change whether they liked it or not, and so he did. At a meeting of the consistory on September 20, eleven cardinals appeared; seven voted for the pope’s plan and four abstained. Ten other cardinals, however, boycotted the meeting.21
Thus it was with limited support that Cesare Borgia was invested as cardinal in a ceremony on September 23, 1493. It was obvious to everyone that he had no religious vocation whatsoever, and very soon he began to make it clear he wanted to be released from his clerical vows.
The Borgia controversies at the Vatican came at a time when tensions were bubbling over on the Italian peninsula. The region had never established any sort of central administration, leaving civil governance dangerously unstable because of the ferocious competition and constant bickering among its largest city-states, which included Venice, Milan, Rome, Florence, and Naples. Milan, Naples, and Rome were at odds over the throne of Naples. Venice was facing a losing war against the Turks over its Balkan possessions. And there was a power vacuum in Florence. The statesman Lorenzo de’ Medici had died in 1492, leaving his maladroit son Piero in his stead.
Milanese humanist Peter Martyr believed Italy was on the verge of war. “The Italian princes I think are turning the times to their own ruin,” he wrote in September 1492, describing the hatred and jealousy brewing in Milan and Naples, which seemed likely to provoke a violent intervention by France: “… Thus Italy forges by degrees the sword by which to kill herself.”22
Indeed, the French were preparing their invasion. To make sure that the Spanish would not intervene when they marched south, King Charles reached out to King Ferdinand to offer to return the territories of Roussillon and Perpignan—the lands mortgaged away by Ferdinand’s father, Juan, when he was putting down the civil uprising in Aragon. Spain and France began negotiations. Observers noted that Spain would in effect be stepping away from any oversight role in Italy as a result of the treaty, and it seemed like one more piece of proof that a war between the Italians and the French was on its way.
For it was becoming increasingly clear that Pope Alexander VI did not have the moral authority to act as a stabilizing force in the land where the Catholic Church made its home. At a church consistory on June 12, 1493, Spanish envoy López de Haro denounced the pope’s foreign policy, saying it was keeping Italy “in a constant state of war,” and he also criticized “the venality of his curia, the scandalous auction of benefices.”23
But these differences were muted—at least for now—by the shared religiosity of Pope Alexander VI and his patrons in Spain. Unquestionably, they were all deeply committed to their practice of Catholicism, if not to its underlying values, and they sought to communicate their faith in ways that would increase the church’s prestige.
This was the period when Ferdinand, Isabella, and Pope Alexander VI pushed ahead with architect Donato Bramante to design and construct the commemorative tomb called the Tempietto on Vatican Hill. A masterpiece of High Renaissance art with precise echoes of the classical world, the building was commissioned by Isabella and Ferdinand, and decorated with the scallop-shell motif that represents Santiago de Compostela and pilgrimage in Spain. Its foundation stone, planted in the wall in 1502, bore the names of Ferdinand and Isabella, written in faux medieval script. Isabella and Cardinal Bernardino López de Carvajal collaborated to collect more than five dozen holy relics for the site, including pieces of the True Cross and fragments from the crib of the infant Jesus. The building struck observers in Rome as something completely new and innovative; it was also a visual representation of the ways in which the joint reign of Isabella and Ferdinand marked the transition between the Middle Ages and the modern era.
Another shared Spanish endeavor was the splendid redecoration of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, the largest church in Rome, dedicated to Christ’s mother. The pope paid for construction of the building’s magnificent gilded ceiling; the actual gold used was said to be among the first of the precious metal to be brought back from the New World, and was a gift to the church from Isabella.24
The queen and the pope shared a belief in the importance of the discoveries in the New World and a sense that the church was destined to make great progress there. In his private apartments at the Vatican, Alexander VI commissioned a monumental painting byPinturicchio, done sometime between 1492 and 1494, that showed the pope kneeling in prayer before the Risen Christ. This work, called The Resurrection, contains in the background, just above Christ’s empty tomb, a depiction of native Americans. They are shown as naked, strong, and muscular, wearing feathered headdresses. It is the first known representation of Indians in European art, and the decision to include them in this masterpiece underscores the pope’s early interest and awareness of the pivotal significance of bringing Christianity to a new land.
The pope’s quick appreciation of the issue paved the way for Isabella to impose her own religious values, in ways both good and bad, on an entire new hemisphere. She brought in Castilian-style education, health care, political systems, and spiritual values to millions of people. She also introduced the Inquisition to the New World, soon after it had taken root in Spain. It meant that the uniquely Spanish combination of in-tellectual inclinations—broad-mindedness in secular matters combined with intolerance of religious differences—made the leap across the ocean, where it would affect cultural and political life in Latin America for more than five hundred years.
But the pope’s most valuable gift to Isabella and to Spain’s future was the fact that he had carved the world in half and given such an important part to Isabella. All in all, it was an extraordinary transaction—first that an individual would have the audacity to divide up the planet, and second that the Catholic Church was so powerful that many people in generations to come never even considered questioning the ruling.
The gift was immediately questioned by native Americans in the New World, however, when they were later informed that the pope had taken land occupied by millions of them and ceded it to the Europeans with a wave of a pen and a dollop of sealing wax. They struggled to grasp the concept that one man—the pope—would be believed to have that much power over heaven and earth.
When it was described to two Indian Cenu chiefs in Colombia in 1512, they shook their heads in wonder. “The Pope must have been drunk,” one said to the other.25