PART TWO
‘She kept always to her room to wash her hair but also because she is rather solitary and remote by nature’
– The Ferrarese envoys accompanying Lucrezia to Duke Ercole describing her embarrassing experience in finding herself in her former city of Pesaro
A list preserved in the archives at Modena details Lucrezia’s company on the long hard journey northwards. She rode either her mule or a white jennet, or, when she was tired, in a handsome litter provided by her father. She was accompanied by her old friends and relations, Geronima Borgia, Adriana de Mila and her ladies, each with her personal servant. Headed by the beautiful Angela Borgia, always known as Dona Angela, they included ‘Elisabetha senese [of Siena] and her daughter, Elisabetha perusina [from Perugia], Catherina Spagnola [from Spain], Alexandra, Geronima [who later married Lucrezia’s favourite doctor, Lodovico Bonaccioli], Nicola [who married into the Ferrarese aristocratic family of Trotti], Camilla, Catherinella negra [a favourite black slave], four chambermaids, la Napolitana [the Neapolitan] with two daughters, Samaritana, and Camilla greca [the Greek] and two handmaids [‘ancille’], and a ‘Madonna Joanna’ (possibly Juana de Moncada, married to one of Alexander’s nephews), with four personal servants. Unmentioned in the archive list or in the list provided by the Ferrarese chronicler Zambotti was a woman named Drusilla, reputed to be Cesare’s lover. The only evidence for this Drusilla is an epigram by the poet Fausto Evangelista Maddaleni entitled ‘On the sorrow of Cesare for the departure of Lucrezia Borgia and Drusilla’.1 Cesare’s biographer, Gustavo Sacerdote, hazards a guess that this Drusilla may have been the mother of his two illegitimate children, Girolamo and Camilla, who followed Lucrezia to Ferrara.
While Ippolito had returned to Rome, Cardinal Cosenza was to accompany Lucrezia as far as Gubbio. Three bishops rode with her household, one of whom, the Bishop of Venosa, was Alexander’s favourite doctor. Also among the party were the major-domo, or master of Lucrezia’s household (bearing the sword and biretta destined for Alfonso from the Pope); ‘Messer Christoforo’ Piccimini, her secretary; il bacilliere, an obscure title, literally meaning ‘the bachelor’, i.e. a graduate, who was probably designated to read to her during her journey or possibly also to compose gracious speeches for her; her master of ceremonies; two chaplains (who may also have been chapel singers); her master of the stables; ‘Vincentio guardaroba’ (probably the same Vincenzo Giordano of her letters from Nepi); Sancho, her scaldo (steward); her master of horse; and Baldassare, her cup-bearer. Also in the party were the man in charge of the knives; the credenciero, responsible for her plate; the undercup-bearer; the doorkeeper; ‘Martin who reads the book’; ten pages; ten grooms; the man in charge of her chapel; the candlemaker; the spenditore who oversaw the expenses of her kitchen; the tailor; upholsterer (repostero); the dispenser of her cellar; two cooks; Alonso, the goldsmith; stable boys; coachmen; the locksmith; the saddler, ‘mastro Alvisi da cremona’; and Navarrico, the Spanish Borgia henchman who featured as a trusted messenger in the Vatican correspondence of 1494 and remained with Lucrezia at Ferrara. For this household alone, she travelled with one hundred and fifty carriages and mules and fifty muleteers.
Eight squires in the service of the Pope, almost all of them Spaniards, also accompanied her, and a party of Roman barons (those not yet dispossessed by Alexander), including Francesco Colonna of Palestrina and his wife, Giuliano Orsini di Stabia, Guillen Ramón, a nephew of the Pope and captain of the papal guard, and Ranuccio degli Ottoni, shortly to be deprived of his property in Macerata by Alexander in favour of the infant Giovanni Borgia. In addition there were four Roman ambassadors; eight Roman noblemen; more than thirty of Cesare’s gentlemen, including the gallant Yves d’Alègre, Ugo de Moncada, Cesare’s right-hand man, Juan Castellar, Remolins, Juan Marrades, and many distinguished Italian noblemen such as the Genoese Ottaviano Fregoso (who featured among the cast of characters in Castiglione’s The Courtier) accompanied by thirty trumpeters, six jesters and ‘Nicolò the musician’. Sanudo computed the Borgia contingent as 753 people, 426 horses and 234 mules.
The five-hundred-strong Ferrarese party, headed by Ferrante and Sigismondo d’Este, included many Este connections, such as Annibale Bentivoglio who was married to Duke Ercole’s illegitimate daughter, Lucrezia; Ercole d’Este, son of the Duke’s brother, Sigismondo; Niccolò da Correggio, whose mother was an Este (as was the mother of Lodovico Pico della Mirandola); Uguccione dei Contrari, the leading Ferrarese nobleman, married to Diana d’Este, daughter of the elder Sigismondo; and many of the nobility with whom Lucrezia was to become familiar and who were to become part of her new life, both Ferrarese and local lords, bound to the Este not only by ties of kinship but by the gift of lands and city palaces, offices and military service. The party included the two Ferrarese envoys Gian Luca Pozzi and Gherardo Saraceni.
Ippolito d’Este, whom both Cesare and Lucrezia had known as a young cardinal, had remained behind in Rome. The third son of Ercole by his wife, the Duchess Eleonora d’Aragona, and just a year older than Lucrezia, he was the cleverest of the Este brothers and the most ruthless. Like Cesare, he had been destined for the Church from an early age: at only three he was given the abbey of Casalnovo in commendam, an early start even for those days. Aged seven, thanks to his aunt, Beatrice d’Aragona, Queen of Hungary, he was given the rich archbishopric of Esztergom in Hungary, with an annual income of 50,000 ducats. Created cardinal in his absence in Hungary by Alexander in 1493, he later spent some time with Ludovico Sforza in Milan where he landed the archbishopric worth 5,000 ducats a year. He also acted as Governor of the city in the absences of Ludovico, but spent most of his time hunting and feasting outside the city. Like Cesare, he was clearly unsuited to the ecclesiastical life and, like him, preferred the exercise of arms and political intrigue to his priestly duties. His father Ercole had frequent occasion to reprove him for wearing armour instead of his priestly robes and for his generally unsuitable behaviour. In 1493 he had adjured the fifteen-year-old cardinal ‘to bear yourself in such a way that you be reputed a wise and prudent Cardinal . . . to give evidence of the virtue of your disposition and of the constancy that a prelate of your rank should have, and one raised to such a dignity as is the Cardinalate’.2 The news that Ippolito had ordered a suit of white armour from Milanese craftsmen in order to fight for Ludovico in 1499 had horrified his father who commanded him ‘to desist from these warlike ways, and to strive to live like a good Archbishop and a most reverend Cardinal’.3 Proud, insolent and voluptuous, but gifted with great personal charm and the family passion for music, Ippolito was to prove a good friend and counsellor to Lucrezia in Ferrara.
Ferrante d’Este, Ercole’s second son by Eleonora, was born in Naples in 1477, when Giuliano della Rovere stood as his godfather. In 1493 he had been dispatched by his father to take service with Charles VIII of France at the French court and was sent there richly equipped with four noble companions and eighty horse. Anxious that his son should make a good impression, Ercole told him he should present perfumes, ‘cose odorifere’, to the King and Queen and the important personages of the court and dispatched a courtier to him bearing grains of musk and ‘two horns of civet’. Ferrante, however, vain, idle and dissolute, soon disappointed his father by not showing enough diligence in serving the French King, preferring to lounge about and enjoy himself. ‘We know that you have plenty of talent and that you know what your duty is, and that, if you wish, you can do yourself credit,’ the anxious father wrote.4 Ercole, however, spoiled his son; in return for repeatedly sending him money, he received news of the French court, but when later that year Charles VIII invaded Italy, instead of showing keenness Ferrante merely dawdled in his wake and remained in Rome enjoying himself instead of following the French army to Naples. Ferrante’s excuse was that he could not afford to go as Charles had not paid his allowance. A furious Ercole sent one of his secretaries to haul Ferrante off to Naples to see the King and supplied him with a letter of credit for 500 ducats. He also sent a stern letter: ‘All these things,’ he wrote,
have proceeded from your own negligence, and from your wishing to give yourself to idleness and avoid labour; because if you had followed the Most Christian King, as was your duty and our intention, you would have got your allowance sooner . . . But you wanted to stay at Rome and take a holiday where you have spent more than you would have done in following the King. If, by your laziness and negligence, you lose the support of the Most Christian King, you will repent of it with time . . . If by your own fault you lose this opening, do not hope for anything from us, save a bad welcome and harsh treatment . . .5
Thus adjured, Ferrante followed the French army to Naples and endeavoured to ingratiate himself with the King, receiving a good report from the ducal secretary. Ercole wrote praising him for having ‘begun to behave yourself well and with diligence . . . you must continue in being diligent and assiduous in the services of that King, and be prompt and ready at that Court . . .’ While Alfonso d’Este remained with Ludovico Sforza, now part of the League against the French, Ferrante was forced to follow Charles so that Ercole could keep in with both sides. He fought with him at the battle of Fornovo and only returned to Italy two years later, in 1497. He then obtained a condotta from Venice for her war against Pisa but, as usual, he was unhappy with his treatment and complained about lack of money, threatening to leave the Venetian service and earning himself another angry letter from his father. Despite all the evidence, Ercole continued to have faith in Ferrante’s charm and his future at the French court and took him with him and Alfonso to Milan to meet Louis XII in 1499. Ferrante singularly failed to live up to his father’s expectations: he had piled up such a mountain of debt while at the French court that poor Bartolommeo de’Cavalleri, Ercole’s ambassador there over the Borgia marriage negotiations, could get no credit and was forced to appeal to Ercole for funds. Louis himself formed a very poor opinion of Ferrante, whom he described as ‘acute but idle and irresponsible’. (Sigismondo d’Este, Ercole’s youngest son, born in September 1480, the least troublesome and ambitious of Ercole’s children, played only a small part in Ferrarese life. Like Alfonso and Ferrante he had contracted syphilis in 1496—7 but while the other brothers seem to have recovered he was so incapacitated by it that he became increasingly unable to live a normal life.)
Progress by the vast cavalcade was extremely slow, the pace being set by Lucrezia who found the horrible winter conditions and the bad roads extremely tiring. The Ferrarese envoys Pozzi and Saraceni, deputed by Ercole to get the bride to Ferrara by the desired date, were in despair. From Foligno a week after their departure from Rome they reported to Ercole:
From Narni we wrote to Your Excellency that we would travel from Terni to Spoleto and from Spoleto here without stopping anywhere: nonetheless the Illustrious Duchess finding herself and her ladies very tired when they arrived at Spoleto, decided to rest for an entire day at Spoleto and then another here so that we will not leave here until tomorrow. And we will not arrive in Urbino before next Tuesday which will be the 18th, because tomorrow we go to Nocera, Saturday to Gualdo, Sunday at Gubbio, Monday at Cagli, then Tuesday at Urbino where we will stay another whole day, that is all Wednesday, and from there we go to Pesaro on the 20th, and then from city to city as we have told Your Excellency. But we are certain that the Duchess will rest many entire days in many of those places so that without doubt we will not arrive in Ferrara before the last day of this month or the first of the next, or even the second or third.
They warned Ercole that he might have to put off the grand reception at Ferrara for a day or two and asked him to let them know what to do: ‘The reason I am led to believe what I have said above is that the Illustrious Madonna Lucrezia is of a delicate complexion and not accustomed to ride and neither are her ladies: and we can understand that she does not wish to arrive at Ferrara exhausted and undone by the journey.’6
Everywhere she went, Lucrezia was received with huge acclaim and rejoicing. At the gate of Foligno, the town of which she had briefly been an absentee Governor, was a trophy depicting the Roman Lucretia with her dagger in her hand and verses declaring how she gave way to this Lucrezia, being far outdone in chastity, modesty, prudence and constancy. Near the piazza was a triumphal car with a cupid in front of it and on it stood Paris with the golden apple of the Hesperides in his hand, declaring that he had given the apple to Venus but since Lucrezia was so far superior in beauty, wisdom and riches to the three goddesses, he had withdrawn it in her favour. Finally, in the middle of the piazza an armed galley with Turks in Turkish robes had advanced to meet her; standing on the prow of the galley one of them declaimed rhyming verses to the effect that their Great King knew how powerful Lucrezia was in Italy and how she could be a good mediator for peace, and therefore he was offering her that Christian territory which he held. ‘We did not bother to take down the words of the verses, as they were not exactly those of Petrarch,’ one envoy commented, ‘nor did the representation of the ship seem of much importance or consequence.’ However, they were both impressed by the appearance, four miles outside Foligno, of the entire Baglioni clan of Perugia gathered to do Lucrezia honour, doubtless, although he did not say so, more from fear of her brother than respect for herself.
Lucrezia, the envoys reported, persisted in her desire to travel by water from Bologna to Ferrara to escape the discomfort of riding and the roads. The Pope was so careful of Lucrezia’s wellbeing ‘that every day and every hour he wanted to hear of her progress: and she has to write in her own hand from each place to tell him of her wellbeing: which confirms what I have told Your Excellency previously that His Holiness loves her more than any other person of his blood . . .’7
On the 18th they were at Urbino, having been greeted two miles outside Gubbio by Elisabetta, the Duchess of Urbino, whom Lucrezia had known while she was married to Giovanni Sforza, and lodged in the palace there, arriving by the light of torches. The arms of the Pope, the King of France, of Borgia and Estense united, and Lucrezia’s own arms were displayed everywhere. At Urbino, Lucrezia and the Este party were lodged in the magnificent ducal palace of the Montefeltro while the Duke Guidobaldo and his Duchess themselves stayed outside the city.
Elisabetta Gonzaga da Montefeltro, Duchess of Urbino (1471 – 1520) was one of the most celebrated women of her age. Sister of Francesco Gonzaga and sister-in-law of Isabella d’Este, to whom she was extremely close, she was much praised for her saintliness in enduring a sexless marriage to Guidobaldo who was both impotent and for much of his life crippled by what was described as ‘gout’ but was probably rheumatoid arthritis, which deformed his body from a young age. According to the archivist Luzio, despite his impotence (which was kept secret until 1502) Guidobaldo was extremely erotically inclined, so that Elisabetta was in a state of suspense every day in case he might fall upon her and have a relapse. Elisabetta was the heroine of The Courtier which described a sophisticated symposium at her court supposedly held over four days in the year 1507. She was accompanied, as always, by her faithful companion, the witty, high-spirited Emilia Pia, daughter of Marco Pio of Carpi, married to an illegitimate brother of Guidobaldo.
Elisabetta Gonzaga had little reason to love the Borgias, both because of Alexander’s treatment of Guidobaldo, his captain in the Orsini war, whom he had refused to ransom and left to languish in captivity and, still more recently, because of the outrageous behaviour of Cesare who, just over a year earlier, had abducted one of her protégées, Dorotea Malatesta, wife of Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, a Neapolitan captain of infantry in the service of Venice. The incident had caused widespread scandal. Dorotea, the twenty-three-year-old natural daughter of Roberto Malatesta of Rimini, had been brought up at the court of Elisabetta at Urbino where her marriage had been celebrated by proxy. She had been travelling under Venetian protection, and with an armed escort provided by Cesare at the request of Venice, to join her husband, when she was seized just after her company had crossed into Venetian territory. Everyone accused Cesare, who remained as arrogant and plausible as ever, blaming one of his captains, Diego Ramires, who, he said, had had an affair with Dorotea during carnival at Urbino. Letters of protest rained down upon him from Venice, the Pope, the King of France, even Francesco Gonzaga on behalf of his sister. But Cesare did not punish Ramires, nor did he restore Dorotea, and the evidence is that he kept her. At the end of December 1502 Sanudo reported: ‘With the Duke when he left Imola was the wife of our captain of infantry’ Cesare’s escapades can hardly have helped Lucrezia’s relations with the Duchess of Urbino. And, close as she was to Isabella, Elisabetta was under no illusions as to her contempt for her Borgia sister-in-law.
Ferrante d’Este had obviously received a sharp rebuke from Isabella for failing adequately to describe Lucrezia’s clothes. He hastened to write from Urbino that truthfully on the journey he had not seen much change in her wardrobe, but after the ball given by the Duke and Duchess in Lucrezia’s apartments in the ducal palace he was able to satisfy her with more detail. Lucrezia, he said, ‘appeared in a dress of black velvet in her own style decorated with raised stripes of drawn gold running down the robe from head to foot, a little necklace of jewels which we gave her round her neck, cap or coif with stripes of beaten gold and a diamond in the veil above her forehead, and a girdle of beaten gold with large tassels of gold and white silk. The whole outfit being so striking that I thought I should describe it to you.’8 When she danced she was followed by two Spanish jesters shouting, ‘Look at the great lady, how pretty her face is and how well she dances, rarely but excellently.’
The Ferrarese envoys remarked on the abundant hospitality offered by Guidobaldo and Elisabetta, both soon to be rudely ejected from their paradise by the bride’s brother. This time they were writing to Ippolito, ‘because knowing how much you love Our Illustrious Duchess, we are sure it will be very pleasing to you to hear the particulars of everything, adding that our Lady Duchess is well and travelling in good spirits; and if sometimes Her Ladyship has been left weak from riding, the next morning she is always gay [gagliarda] . . .’9 On the same day they wrote a long letter to Ercole projecting the time of arrival at Ferrara. As to whether they would travel the final stage from Bologna by road or water, Lucrezia told them the decision awaited the Pope’s answer. Although she would prefer to travel by water, ‘she defers so much to His Holiness in every little thing because she is most obedient to him and because she is discreet, respectful and prudent in a manner that she does not want her own way but follows the wish and opinion of those superior to her or greater than her’.10
Lucrezia and Elisabetta travelled on together from Urbino in the splendid litter provided by the Pope, which seemed infinitely preferable to riding on horseback through the mud. This was prompted by a difficult, muddy two-day journey which left not only Lucrezia and the ladies tired but the horses and mules exhausted when they finally arrived in Pesaro. It must have been a curious sensation for Lucrezia to enter the city of which, as wife of Giovanni Sforza, she had once been countess; now she was there as an honoured guest of her absent brother who, when he was in the city, was accustomed to occupying Giovanni Sforza’s rooms. A hundred children in Cesare’s colours of yellow and red, with olive branches in their hands, greeted her with cries of ‘Duca, Duca, Lucrezia, Lucrezia’. The highest ranking ladies, her former subjects, greeted her warmly in her former palace, ‘with so great a demonstration of affection and respect that one could not wish for better’, noted the envoys of this disloyal or, rather, cynical behaviour. Lucrezia permitted her ladies and damsels to dance with the Pesarese in her antechamber but she herself was not present, clearly feeling a certain reserve about the situation. ‘She kept always to her room,’ the envoys wrote, ‘to wash her hair but also because she is rather solitary and remote by nature.’11
Lucrezia was now passing through Cesare’s duchy of Romagna, staying in palaces from which he had rudely dislodged their former lords—Giovanni Sforza, bitter in exile in Venice; Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini; Caterina Sforza of Imola and Forlì, now released from the dungeons of Sant’Angelo, greatly aged by her ordeal at the hands of the Borgias but living in comfort in the Villa Medici in Fiesole as the widow of Giovanni de’Medici; and Faenza whose young lord Astorre, after putting up a gallant defence against Cesare, had also been lodged in Sant’Angelo, an experience he would not survive. The shadow of Cesare lay across her path wherever she went. From Cesena on 24 January the envoys reported Ferrante’s alarm at a rumour that Caracciolo was in the area and a kidnap attempt might be made on her, in revenge against Cesare for his part in the abduction of Dorotea. 12 In every city of the Romagna through which Lucrezia passed, on Cesare’s orders crowds of children greeted her dressed in Lucrezia’s livery of yellow and mulberry and waving olive branches; in all the palaces in which she stayed, so recently vacated by their former lords, the halls were extravagantly decorated and the local grandees lined up to meet her. At Cesare’s orders, Don Ramiro de Lorqua, his sinister Governor of the Romagna, had had the roads levelled and repaired; the entire cost of the passage of her huge company, some 8,000 ducats, was borne by her brother. At Imola, Lucrezia once again insisted on spending a day to wash her hair before facing the Bentivoglio at Bologna in another situation complicated by Cesare’s manoeuvres. The previous summer he had made threats against Bologna, where the Bentivoglio had only saved themselves by invoking the protection of the King of France, while Ginevra Bentivoglio, wife of Giovanni, lord of Bologna, was Giovanni Sforza’s aunt. The envoys were in despair at Lucrezia’s decision to linger in Imola. ‘With Your Excellency’s letters of the 25th we have renewed our insistence with the Illustrious Duchess so that we can leave this place tomorrow and arrive in the Borgo San Luca [outskirts of Ferrara] by the last day of the month, as YE desires . . . She answered us that she was always willing to conform to Your Highness’s will but it was necessary for her to remain here tomorrow, for the reasons already given and because the Duchess of Urbino also wanted to wash her hair which it seemed to her could not easily be done in Bologna . . .’13
If there seems to have been much made of Lucrezia’s practice of washing her hair, it is worth commenting that this was an important part of the Renaissance woman’s beauty procedures. Marinello, the sixteenth-century authority on health and beauty,14 gives five pages of recipes for colouring the hair blonde with various waters, including ashes of vine stocks boiled in water with barley straw, liquorice root cleaned of its outer bark and chopped, and cedar smoothed with a knife; used to wash close to the head and left to dry this ‘will make the hair shine and glitter like gold thread’. Other ingredients included saffron, shavings from horses’ hooves, cumin, myrrh and rock alum. Foreheads were to be kept high, white and serene by hair removal, by applying a paste of mastic overnight. Perhaps the most revolting beauty treatment for whitening the skin of the face, neck, hands and other parts of the body ‘whiter than alabaster’ was this, also from Marinello: ‘Take two young white doves, cut off their necks, pluck them and draw out their innards, then grind them with four ounces of peach stones, and the same of washed melon seeds, two ounces of sublimate of mercury, a spoon of bean flour and ground pebbles which have been infused for a day and a night in milk: two young cabbages: a fresh cheese made that day or hour, fourteen whites of fresh eggs, half an ounce of camphor and an equal amount of borax; and four bulbs of the white lily, ground together and mixed together, put in a glass vial [labico] and mix with water and use at your pleasure.’ He continued with a further eight pages of recipes for whitening skin, considered so necessary for the appearance of beauty No wonder the ladies needed an entire day for their beauty treatments.
Finally, on 29 January, Lucrezia and Elisabetta, flanked by Ferrante and Sigismondo, made a grand entry into Bologna.Three miles outside the city she had been greeted by Giovanni Bentivoglio’s four sons, then two miles outside by the Lord Giovanni himself, who paid her the signal honour of dismounting to take her hand. The windows overlooking the streets she passed through were crowded with spectators, the walls decorated with the papal arms surmounting those of the Commune of Bologna, those of the King of France, the Este, Borgia and Duke of Romagna. That evening, Giovanni Bentivoglio gave a magnificent ball attended by many of the most beautiful women in Bologna in his palace where Lucrezia and her suite were lodged. By the end of the day Lucrezia, the cynosure of all eyes, was exhausted: so much so that the next day she slept late and, as Pozzi reported to Ercole, he had not the heart to waken her when the courier arrived with Ercole’s letters and instructions.15
Lucrezia was aware that she was under close inspection every day and hour of her journey. Ferrante may have been dilatory in his reporting but Isabella’s other correspondent, El Prete, was not. At Cagli he had even managed to see the room where Lucrezia had slept and to examine her nightclothes. He wrote that Lucrezia was assiduous in her change of toilettes, even down to the harness of her horses and mules. He sent intimate reports of her entourage of ladies whom he described as ‘galante dame’: ‘the first is Madonna Hieronyma [or Geronima] Borgia, sister of the Cardinal, who they say has the French disease, the other is called Madonna Angela [Borgia] who I think will please you because she is my favourite, and she is the natural sister of Madonna Hieronyma, there is a Catalina from Valencia whom some admire and some do not, a girl from Perugia who is beautiful, another Catalina, two Neapolitan girls, one called Cintia, the other Catalina, who are not very good looking but graceful, and a Moor, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and gay and well dressed, she wears bracelets of gold and pearls . . . I understand she is the lady’s dearest favourite.’ El Prete became ever more impressed by Lucrezia, no doubt to Isabella’s distaste. Like everyone else who met her he found her quite different from the villainess and whore of her earlier reputation: ‘I can tell you that the bearing of this lady is modest, from her head which has no curls and her breast covered, as indeed is the case with all her damsels. Every day she makes a better impression on me; she is a lady with a very good mind, astute [so that] you have to keep your wits about you with her. To sum up, I hold her to be a wise lady, and this is not only my opinion but that of all this company . . .’16
All these enthusiastic reports of his bride excited the curiosity of Alfonso d’Este who until now had held himself resolutely aloof, indeed angry, ‘con la moscha,’ at having to marry her. On 31 January, Lucrezia and the Este rode to Bentivoglio, intending, according to the Pope’s decision, to go by water to Ferrara, in boats to be provided by Ercole.17 At Bentivoglio on 31 January, Alfonso arrived unannounced shortly after the arrival of Lucrezia’s party.
This evening at the 23rd hour, the Illustrious madama Duchessa having arrived shortly before, the Illustrious Don Alfonso arrived unexpectedly, so that he had already mounted the stairs of this palace before the Duchess had notice of it. The Magnificent Messer Hannibale [Annibale Bentivoglio, Ercole’s son-in-law] was the first [to know] and announced it and immediately all through the palace there was huge applause and everyone crying ‘Alfonso’. The Duchess, although she was astonished by the unexpected arrival of Don Alfonso, nonetheless received His Lordship with so much reverence and good grace that it must not have displeased her. We cannot describe the joy which all her company experienced, and Don Alfonso in person and manners could truly not have comported himself in every way with more kindness and naturalness which pleased everyone.18
In a second letter of the same day, the envoys added that as a result of the conversations which Lucrezia and Alfonso had enjoyed together ‘on diverse and pleasing subjects’, they had commissioned Pozzi and Saraceni to say that they had decided that it would be best to travel from there to Ferrara by land, because the road was good and if they took the water route they would arrive very late. ‘This decision appeared a very necessary one to us,’ the long-suffering envoys added, ‘given that only with the greatest difficulty is it possible to get these duchesses to leave on time.’
Lucrezia was enchanted by this unexpected arrival, a romantic gesture on the part of Alfonso who hitherto had given every impression of distaste for their forthcoming marriage. He was four years older than her, born in 1476 at Ferrara, the eldest son of Ercole by Duchess Eleonora and named Alfonso after his maternal great grandfather (bisavolo). Alfonso was described by his contemporary biographer and secretary Bonaventura Pistofilo as tall, long-faced, ‘of a grave and lordly aspect, more melancholy and severe than happy and joyous’. From the portrait medal engraved for his wedding, he appears somewhat heavy-faced and, increasingly unusual for those days, beardless. He was a man of few words and kept his own counsel but beneath his reserved appearance he was capable of strongly emotional reactions. He was physically powerful and well-built, fit from the physical exercise in which he took great pleasure, which included boating and swimming in the lake in the castle garden at Ferrara (in winter he would put the boat on a sledge and skate over the ice) and tennis. Hunting was also a passion, as it was for most of his contemporaries, and he was a good judge of arms, birds and horses. Less articulate and courtly than his father, he was physically courageous and a skilled leader of men, qualities which were to stand him in good stead during the years of war which were soon to engulf Ferrara. He was a widower, his first wife, Anna Sforza, having died in childbirth in November 1497, when Alfonso, so the Ferrarese chronicler recorded, was so disfigured by syphilitic pustules on his face that he had been unable to attend her funeral. He liked whores and low companions but, although uninterested in letters and humanism, he had his father’s passion for music and architecture, and was a skilled player on the viola. In the years of peace he indulged his interest as a collector of antiquities and patron of Bellini and Titian. He had practical skills, learned to use a lathe and had foundries in his garden where he practised the fusion of bronze and made cannon with his own hands; he would become the most skilful deployer of artillery of his generation. His device, suitably, was an exploding grenade. He also made terracotta vases and plates which he used for his own table. He was shrewd, with knowledge and experience of foreign affairs, and proved dexterous in guiding his state through the treacherous currents of war and international politics. He was not gregarious and disliked crowds but was kind and pleasant to his household. He was not, in short, the kind of man to whom Lucrezia was naturally attracted; she would not be faithful to him, nor he to her, but over the years of their marriage a mutual respect would develop and, on Alfonso’s side at least, a deep love.
In Rome, meanwhile, Alexander was tortured about his possible mistreatment of Lucrezia. Beltrando Costabili, the Ferrarese ambassador who had remained at Rome to continue final negotiations with Alexander, reported to Ercole a disquieting conversation he had had with the Pope: ‘The Pope had heard that Don Alfonso did not sleep with his first wife; and let it be understood that he would experience the most profound displeasure if he heard that he did not share his bed with the Duchess Lucrezia
. . .19 Since Alfonso’s first wife had died in childbirth this outburst must have been prompted by the old fear of non-consummation which had agitated him at the time of Juan Gandia’s marriage. Probably he suspected the Este might try to wriggle out of this marriage on these grounds, as indeed he himself had done with Giovanni Sforza. Concern for Lucrezia’s wellbeing in what was in truth a forced marriage was evidently still in his mind. Three days later, in discussions with Costabili over Cento and La Pieve, Alexander ‘speaking afterwards of his family links with the Estense, had declared that if they would treat Duchessa Lucrezia well, he would think of ways of making them great . . .’20
In the end, Lucrezia and the Este travelled to Ferrara not by road but along the waterways in a ship, a bucentaur (bucintoro), provided by Ercole. The most usual means of travelling in the region, the Val Padana, was by water. At the time a system of rivers and canals linked most of the important cities of Lombardy, the Emilia and the Veneto. Bologna, Modena, Argenta and most of the Este villas could be reached by water from Ferrara, and the Po was the most important artery for travel across northern Italy. The bucentaur was equipped with a mast and a sail as well as oars, and in shallower waters would be drawn by horses. Its superstructure contained several rooms magnificently decorated, painted by artists and hung with tapestries.
The anxious ambassadors had actually succeeded in getting the party off before dawn the next day in order to keep to the schedule planned by Ercole. At Malalbergo, Lucrezia was met by her new sister-in-law – one of the most famous and formidable women in Italy, Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, wife of Francesco Gonzaga. Neither of the women was looking forward to the encounter. Lucrezia was intelligent enough to be aware that Isabella did not welcome her. Isabella was seething throughout these days of celebration when Lucrezia, not herself, would be the centre of attention. Indeed, she had written to her husband the previous day that ‘to my great displeasure’ she would have to get up early to go by boat to meet the bride. At twenty-eight, Isabella was six years older than Lucrezia and had already been married twelve years. She was of middle height with a tendency to plumpness and had dark eyes and an abundance of fair hair with a reddish tint. She was extremely intelligent and well informed and a passionate, even rapacious, collector of antiquities and works of art. She was cultivated and well read, sang and accompanied herself on the lute and was accustomed to praise from the great men of literature of the day. Niccolò da Correggio called her ‘la prima donna del mondo’ – the first lady of the world. She patronized the leading artists of the time – even Leonardo da Vinci sketched her. She was very conscious of her high birth, as the eldest daughter of the Duke of Ferrara and of Eleonora d’Aragona, daughter of King Ferrante of Naples, and her pride was cut to the quick at the thought of the upstart Borgia occupying the place of her royal mother as Duchess of Ferrara. Like most aristocrats of her day but more so, Isabella was a tremendous snob. An inscription round the courtyard near her studioloproclaimed her status as granddaughter of a king, daughter of a duke, and wife of a marquis. She was conscious that Lucrezia as Duchess of Ferrara would outrank her. Mantua was a small and relatively unimportant state which could not be compared in territory or wealth with Ferrara; indeed, Isabella resented the fact that her revenues could not keep up with her expensive tastes. Francesco Gonzaga supplemented his income by making his name as a condottiere, working under contract to the various powers in Italy. Her letters to Francesco (who was not at the wedding as he had been advised not to attend by Ercole, probably because of the Pope’s loud complaints against him for harbouring Cesare’s enemies, such as Giovanni Sforza) were redolent of her distaste for the Borgia marriage.
Isabella was accompanied by Giulio, the handsomest of the Este brothers, and Ercole’s illegitimate son, born in 1478 from a relationship with one of his wife’s (married) ladies, Isabella Arduino. As Isabella described it to her husband, Francesco Gonzaga, the two sisters-in-law greeted each other with embraces and happy faces before continuing down the canal to Torre de Fossa where Ercole, with the entire court, was waiting on the river bank to greet Lucrezia. When she disembarked he took her hand and kissed her, although she attempted to kiss his hand first. Then they embarked on the great ducal bucentaur which was already crowded with the ambassadors of all the powers, among whom Isabella and Lucrezia were seated. Alfonso and Ercole were on the poop, amusing themselves by listening to the jesters who, in Ferrarese dialect and Spanish rhyme, eulogized Lucrezia and the Este. The party arrived to the sound of trumpets and artillery at the house of Ercole’s illegitimate brother, Alberto d’Este, where Lucrezia was to spend the night before making her ceremonial entry into Ferrara. ‘I will not describe her to you because I know you have seen her,’ Isabella wrote to Francesco, before then going into great detail about her clothes: Lucrezia wore a robe of drawn gold garnished with crimson satin with sleeves in the Castilian style and a cloak slashed with mulberry satin lined with sable, and a necklace of large pearls with a pendant spinel, pierced with a pendant pear-shaped pearl. She wore a gold headdress without a veil.21
For Lucrezia this was the first sight of the father-in-law she had so assiduously courted. At seventy-one Ercole was tall, with strongly marked features, an aquiline nose and a thin, forbidding mouth. He was born in October 1431, the son of the Marquis Niccolò III by his third wife, Ricciarda da Saluzzo, but had spent most of his early life, from fourteen to the age of almost thirty, at the court of Naples where he and his brother Sigismondo had had a humanist education with the future King Ferrante. They had in fact been exiled by their father to keep them out of Ferrara so that their illegitimate half-brothers, Leonello and Borso, could succeed. From the time Ercole grew up he had spent his time as a leading condottiere, first for the Aragonese and then the Angevin factions in Naples and finally for Venice. He was devious and ruthless, having engineered his own succession as Duke in 1471 in place of the chosen heir, Niccolò, whom he then plotted unsuccessfully to have poisoned. Five years later, when Niccolò attempted to take over Ferrara, Ercole had him beheaded privately in the cortile of the Castello and then, for reasons of family pride, had his head sewn back on and the body dressed for burial in gold brocade. The history of the ancient Este family was as bloodstained as most of the great Italian families, a record of plot and counterplot, executions and torture, as Lucrezia herself was to discover. The plots were customarily among themselves and not takeover attempts by outsiders, a pattern of behaviour which was to repeat itself with tragic consequences early in Alfonso’s reign.
Ercole was an astute and cautious ruler but, as the historian of Ferrara has remarked, hardly one to be trusted.22 In Naples he betrayed the Aragonese in favour of their predecessors, the Angevins, then married Eleonora, daughter of the childhood companion, Ferrante, whom he had betrayed. He then betrayed the Venetians who had helped him secure the duchy, an act of treachery which resulted in the disastrous war of Ferrara (1482 – 4) and the loss of the Polesine of Rovigo. Ercole was absolute master of Ferrara and popular with his people, although in recent years the extravagance with which he had indulged his passions for building, music and musicians and the theatre had led to administrative abuses such as the sale of offices. His greatest achievement as ruler had been his success in involving the citizens of Ferrara in the identity of the Este, with theatrical spectacles, jousts, tournaments and religious and charitable ceremonies. Bernardino Zambotti, the not-unprejudiced author of the Diario Ferrarese, wrote of him: ‘. . . this Duke of Ferrara in wisdom, shrewdness, experience and goodness was the first man of Italy, and thus more faithful and discreet, and loved by all the governments of Italy, except by the Venetians, who barely wished to hear his name mentioned’.23 Since the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1492, the defeat of Ludovico il Moro in 1500, and the destruction of the Aragonese in Naples, Ercole was indeed the preeminent prince in Italy. Altogether, despite his defects, his indecision and inattention to administration, Lucrezia’s future father-in-law, soberly dressed in black as was his wont, was an impressive figure.
The Ferrara which Lucrezia saw across the River Po from the house of Alberto d’Este on the opposite bank was a glittering city, with walls, towers and battlements frescoed with chivalric scenes or painted in the Este colours of red, white and green. In the centre of the city, the grim fourteenth-century dark red brick Castello (the Castel Vecchio, or Old Castle), with its moat, four towers, and below-ground dungeons dominated its surroundings. It was linked by a covered way with the Palazzo del Corte, the Court Palace, a graceful building with arches and loggias of white Istrian stone in the style of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, overlooking the cathedral and the main square, the theatre for public events – jousts, tournaments and, less pleasantly, executions. To the north of the Castello, a whole new quarter known as the Terra Nova was Ercole’s creation, with new streets, a piazza, palaces, gardens, churches and monasteries built over the last twenty years. The city was well defended with ramparts, redoubts and another castle, the Castel Novo, overlooking the Po. The Este dukes had created an impressive setting for the display of their power and prestige and, under their initiative, fifteenth-century Ferrara had become one of the major centres of Renaissance theatre, music and the decorative arts. The court was one of the most splendid in Italy, the palaces richly furnished with tapestries, silk hangings, oriental carpets, alabaster and painted and frescoed rooms. Its splendours rivalled Florence of the Medici, far outstripped those of the contemporary papal court, certainly the provincialism of Pesaro and even the magnificent ducal palace at Urbino. Outside the city, Este wealth and power were demonstrated by a number of magnificent villas and hunting lodges. All this was to be the state of Lucrezia Borgia, bastard daughter of a Spanish pope.