‘She is most beautiful of face, with vivacious, laughing eyes, upright in her posture, acute, most prudent, most wise, happy, pleasing and friendly’
—The Ferrarese chronicler Bernardino Zambotti, describing Lucrezia’s arrival in Ferrara, 2 February 1502
Ferrara, a northern river city on a flat plain ribboned with waterways and marshes, could hardly have been more different from Rome, some two hundred miles to the south. In the autumn heavy rains drenched the streets: now in winter, with chilling mists rising from the surrounding waters and the canals that bisected the town, its gaily painted battlements and gilded towers took on the appearance of a medieval miniature. And on 2 February 1502, the day appointed for Lucrezia’s formal entry into the city which was to be her home for the rest of her life, the scene was a blaze of colour.
The arrival of the bride destined to be the next Duchess of Ferrara had been the occasion for months of preparations intended to impress not just Lucrezia and her suite but also the envoys of all the powers represented and the citizens themselves with the ducal magnificence of the Este. Lucrezia crossed the bridge over the Po into the city through the fortified gate of Castel Tedaldo, where doctors of the University of Ferrara waited to hold a canopy of white silk over her. She was mounted on a splendid horse caparisoned in cloth of gold with gilded harness, and accompanied on foot by eight of Alfonso’s courtiers. This was fortunate for, a few moments later, the horse, startled by a shot, threw her and she had to be helped to her feet, laughing, and remounted on a mule which Ercole had thoughtfully provided. Riding beside her under the canopy in the place of honour was the ambassador of the King of France, signifying his approval of the marriage.1
The bridal procession then wound through the streets headed by seventy-five of Alfonso’s mounted crossbowmen in his red and white livery, wearing white plumed caps in the French style, followed by eighty trumpeters and twenty-four musicians playing woodwind instruments, then the Duchess of Urbino’s company, in black satin and velvet, with Alfonso and his brother-in-law, Annibale Bentivoglio, bringing up the rear. Alfonso rode a great bay horse, with trappings of purple velvet glittering with plates of beaten gold in high relief. He himself wore a tunic of grey velvet all covered with scales of beaten gold, a black velvet beret on his head, with laces of beaten gold and white plumes, and short boots of soft grey skin made from unborn calves. Behind him marched Lucrezia’s company, ten Spanish arquebusiers dressed in gold brocade and black velvet, followed by five bishops and the Ferrarese gentlemen and courtiers marching two by two with the Italian ambassadors. Lucrezia rode behind, then Ercole and the Duchess of Urbino side by side, followed by Geronima Borgia and Adriana de Mila, then Lucrezia Bentivoglio in a carriage covered with gold brocade and, following her, in twenty court carriages decorated in gold brocade and white silk drawn by white horses, the Ferrarese and Bolognese gentlewomen and damsels allotted by Ercole to attend the bride.
Lucrezia herself sparkled, her dress carefully noted by Isabella d’Este in one of her daily reports to her absent husband, Francesco Gonzaga. She wore a robe with long sleeves in the French style lined with ermine and decorated with interwoven stripes of cloth of gold and violet satin and over it a cloak of drawn cloth of gold open on one side to reveal its ermine lining. Bitterly, Isabella noted round Lucrezia’s neck a diamond and ruby necklace which had belonged to the Duchess Eleonora and on her head the headdress which Ercole had sent to Rome for her,2 also undoubtedly a part of the family jewels since it was loaded with spinels, diamonds and sapphires and other precious stones, including very large pearls. ‘The jewellers,’ wrote Bernardino Zambotti, ‘estimated its worth at 30,000 ducats.’ Zambotti was equally impressed by Lucrezia’s baggage train of seventy-two mules caparisoned in her livery of yellow and mulberry and carrying her rich trousseau worth at least 200,000 ducats beyond the 100,000 in cash. He was very taken with the bride’s appearance (he gave her age as twenty-four although she was still only twenty-two – since other authorities overestimated her age, Lucrezia must have looked older than she actually was). ‘She is,’ he wrote, ‘most beautiful of face, with vivacious, laughing eyes, upright in her posture, acute, most prudent, most wise, happy, pleasing and friendly. ‘The people were pleased by her, he said, hoping therefore for help and good government from her and beyond that great benefit to the city, particularly by the authority of the Pope, ‘who loves this daughter of his above all things, as he has demonstrated with the dowry and the castles (Cento and Pieve) which he has conceded to Don Alfonso’. Lucrezia’s prize for completing the final part of her journey to Ferrara was another valuable consignment of Este family jewels presented to her that day, including a silver gilt mirror surrounded by rubies and diamonds.3
Winding through the streets of the city, past platforms of citizens declaiming the praises of Lucrezia and the Pope, the procession reached the piazza in front of the cathedral and the Palazzo del Corte, where two acrobats swung down on ropes from two towers to arrive simultaneously at the cathedral door, to the great amazement of the crowd. As soon as Lucrezia had dismounted at the palace, in the customary division of spoils Ercole’s crossbowmen seized the baldachin and fell to squabbling with Alfonso’s men over her mule, an argument won by Alfonso’s servants. At the head of the marble staircase (which still exists) she was greeted by Isabella, with Lucrezia Bentivoglio, three bastard daughters of Ercole’s brother Sigismondo d’Este, including one of the principal courtiers, Diana, Countess Contrari, and the ladies of the court, and taken through the Great Hall (Sala Grande) decorated with cloth of silver and gold and precious silks, and featuring two gilded giants with maces in hand. From there they proceeded to Ercole’s apartments in the Palazzo del Corte which had been specially prepared for the bridal couple, while Ercole himself retreated to newly decorated rooms in the Castel Novo.
After a short while Lucrezia and Alfonso were left alone together for the first time. Forced marriage or not, Alfonso found Lucrezia sexually attractive: that night, according to the report of Isabella’s chancellor to Francesco, he made love to her three times (‘ha camminato tre miglia’).4 He continued to spend every night with her. What he did during the day was another matter, returning to his former ‘Prince Hal’ life of whores and low tavern companions. Lucrezia’s father, however, was characteristically delighted by the news, ‘particularly understanding that they continue to sleep together at night’, Beltrando Costabili, the Ferrarese envoy at Rome, reported, ‘although he has heard that Don Alfonso takes his pleasure in diverse places as a young man, His Holiness says that he does very well’.5
Although Ercole reported happily to the Pope that Alfonso and Lucrezia ‘gave each other pleasure’, that did not mean they loved each other. It was a marriage of state, eagerly entered into by the one, reluctantly by the other. Lucrezia was not attracted by Alfonso’s rough ways and manners and reserved character, but she had achieved her ambition and she was determined to make a success of her career as Duchess of Ferrara. She used charm and tact to consolidate her position. She had already won over the Este men; she even attempted to win over Isabella herself, but here she met with a polite, well-concealed rebuff. Isabella’s family pride was offended by this young cuckoo in the Este nest, resentful that anyone with Lucrezia’s background should occupy her mother’s place. She had her spy in the Este chancellery, Bernardino di Prosperi, a devoted follower who gave her daily news of Lucrezia’s progress, and whose letters, running into thousands, provide the best and most continuous contemporary account of Lucrezia’s life in Ferrara.
Isabella’s letters to her husband, describing the post-marriage festivities which took place during those carnival days at Ferrara, make clear her resentment. She was not, she made it plain, enjoying herself. There had been no boisterous matinata with the family and favoured courtiers waking the newly-wed couple with lewd jokes. Perhaps, since the bride could by no stretch of the imagination be described as a virgin, it was considered inappropriate by the Este. Lucrezia, reportedly ‘tired from her night’s engagement with her husband’, kept to her apartments with her household the next day and did not leave them until Isabella and her ladies came after dinner to take her into the Sala Grande for dancing. Lucrezia, with Isabella, the Duchess of Urbino, and Lucrezia’s company of Roman and Ferrarese ladies, sat on a tribune decorated with cloth of curled gold and tapestries. Isabella complained that the hall was so crowded that dancing was almost impossible and after two dances Ercole paraded 110 actors in their costumes for the five comedies by Plautus which were to be enacted over the following days. The party then went by covered way to the Palace of Justice (the Palazzo della Ragione) nearby, where there would be more space for plays. A stage was set up with painted wooden houses and castles and the company disposed themselves on specially constructed rows all around the room. The comedy the Epidicus was presented, interspersed with moresche —dancing tableaux – including a mock fight of gladiators. Isabella, like her sister-in-law and close friend Elisabetta da Montefeltro, the latter nine years older than Lucrezia, must have felt their noses out of joint at the younger woman’s glamour and her position at the centre of attention; they did not enjoy themselves. The first play, the Epidicus, always had been mediocre, Isabella told Francesco, although she went into detail about the four moresche, which featured soldiers, Moors and mock battles. There was no time to describe the variety and number of changes of Lucrezia’s dresses, she said, and complained of the numerous pickpockets operating there – one thief had been found hiding under the bed in the Palazzo Schifanoia and had robbed Cesare’s envoy of a valuable gold chain, for which he was hanged the next day as a deterrent to other. 6
A tone of rancour and disparagement of Lucrezia ran through all accounts by Isabella and her entourage of the wedding festivities. The Marchioness of Cotrone wrote a letter of breathtaking sycophancy to Francesco Gonzaga featuring his wife as the star of the proceedings: on the day of Lucrezia’s entry, she wrote, Isabella overshadowed everyone in her ‘beauty and elegant appearance . . . grace and everything’, so much so that had Lucrezia been aware of this she would have made her entry accompanied by blazing candelabra. On the night of the ball, she reported, ‘As soon as your illustrious consort appeared in the room, all eyes turned where she went, and when she arrived among the ladies, she appeared as the sun does obscuring with its rays all the stars . . . Throughout this court one hears the two jesters, finely dressed in clothes given them by the Marchesana [Isabella] shouting out the royal behaviour of the Marchesana. In fact, my lord, the praise of all these feasts will be all for my excellent patroness and consequently of Your Excellency . . .’7
Isabella was infuriated by the time it took Lucrezia to rise and dress herself in the morning, as she complained to Francesco:
Yesterday we all had to remain in our rooms until the twenty-third hour because Donna Lucretia takes so long to rise and dress herself . . . and, it being Friday, there could be no dancing so at the twenty-third hour there began the comedy, Le Bachide, which was so long and tedious and without fine intermezzi that more than once I wished myself in Mantua to which it seems a thousand years before I will be able to return—both to see our little son and to get out of here where there is no pleasure at all. Your Lordship should not envy me for your not being here at this marriage because it is of such a coldness that I envy anyone who remained in Mantua.
She used the same words in a brief note to her brother-in-law, Sigismondo Gonzaga, the same day 8
Isabella was never backward in singing her own praises to Lucrezia’s detriment. She did not have a moment to write in her own hand as she would have liked, she told her husband, because the whole day her brothers never left her alone nor did the gentlewomen who courted her because they could not see Lucrezia until she came down to the hall. ‘At the fifth hour of night we meet, at the seventh and eighth we go to bed. Just think how much pleasure I take from this and have pity on me.’ Just to underline the superiority of her own behaviour as compared with that of her new sister-in-law, she added a proud postscript: ‘I cannot refrain from saying in commendation of myself that I am always the first up and dressed.’
‘Coldness’ was again the theme of her next report: ‘Saturday passed with this coldness: the bride did not make herself visible, having spent the day washing her hair and writing letters . . .’9 This sin was compounded in Isabella’s eyes by Lucrezia’s making a private presentation that evening to Ercole of the papal brief rescinding the census. Isabella and Elisabetta amused themselves, meanwhile, by touring the city with Ferrante, Giulio and Niccolò da Correggio, returning to entertain the French ambassador who had invited himself to dine. After dinner the ladies and ‘some Frenchmen and Spaniards sent by the Lady’ danced il ballo del capello (the hat dance) and finally, by general request, she said, Isabella sang, accompanying herself on the lute. On Sunday in the cathedral the Pope’s representative presented Alfonso with the sword and cap blessed by the Pope at Christmas, and that evening Isabella and Elisabetta, with the Este brothers, fetched Lucrezia to the Sala Grande to dance for two hours, during which time Lucrezia danced somebasse francese with one of her damsels ‘very gallantly’, as even Isabella admitted. There was yet another comedy, the Miles Gloriosus, and intermezzi. The following day, from the balcony of the Torre di Rigobello of the palace, Lucrezia and the company watched a joust in the piazza between a Mantuan knight and a Bolognese, in the course of which the Bolognese’s horse was killed. This, according to Isabella, was a victory for the Mantuan, who shouted ‘Turco! Turco!’, the Gonzaga battle cry. This bloodthirsty spectacle was followed by another comedy, the Asinaria, and a Mantuan composition by the celebrated singer and composer Tromboncino, who again performed an intermezzo to the comedy La Cassina the next day, when a barzelleta in honour of the bridal couple was sung. Later six violas were played, one of them by Alfonso himself. That morning, 6 February, Ercole presented Lucrezia with what Isabella described as ‘almost all the remaining jewels’, including diamonds, rubies, turquoises and pearls set in gold or fashioned into head ornaments.10 Following this the ambassadors had given her their wedding presents – rich pieces of cloth, crimson velvet cloaks from the Venetians, curled cloth of gold from the Florentines and two silver vases from the Sienese.
Isabella described La Cassina as ‘lascivious and immoral’ although she enjoyed the sight of Alfonso and Giulio taking part in almost all the intermezzi. But she remained bored and distant from the festivities, as she told Francesco: ‘I am more than certain that you will have derived more pleasure from my letters than I have from these festivities because I have never been in any place with more tedium than I have here . . .’II On Saturday without fail she would leave for Mantua accompanied by Elisabetta. All the ambassadors were leaving the following day, except the Roman ladies who had come with Lucrezia, because the Pope had written telling them that they should stay for the present – perhaps, she thought, so that they could be sent to France to fetch Cesare’s wife, Charlotte d’Albret. (Charlotte never arrived, but her brother, Cardinal d’Albret, did, and ‘being young’ amused himself greatly taking part in the dancing.) ‘How much this pleases my father your lordship can imagine,’ she added sarcastically. The Gonzaga secretary, Benedetto Capilupo, was deliberately malicious when he compared the style and grace with which Isabella and Elisabetta responded to the formal farewells of the Venetian ambassadors with Lucrezia’s performance: Isabella replied to the ambassadors’ speeches ‘with such great eloquence and prudence that it would have sufficed for every consummate orator’, he wrote to Francesco, but as for Lucrezia, ‘although she has had more experience of men than either your wife or your sister, she got nowhere near their prudent replies . . .’12
Now that it was Lent and the festivities were over, there was little to do. Inseparable, Isabella and Elisabetta wandered the streets of Ferrara looking for amusement before going to dine with Lucrezia in the late Duchess Eleonora’s apartment in the Castello which she and Alfonso now occupied. As usual, there were complaints about her tardiness: it was the twenty-third hour and she had only just finished dressing. On 11 February, Ercole paid Lucrezia the great compliment of taking her and Isabella to see his cherished Sister Lucia: ‘She was in bed in a trance,’ Isabella reported, ‘because of the passion she had suffered the previous night and did not recognize anyone, even her relatives from Viterbo, a stupendous thing.’13
A few days later Ercole, who was truly charmed by his daughter-in-law and their shared interest in nuns, went personally to fetch Lucrezia from the castle and again took her to visit Sister Lucia, with the additional treat of seeing a nun who had been brought from St Peter’s in Rome after being walled up there.14 Whatever his daughter and her courtiers might have thought, he was pleased with his daughter-in-law, as he wrote to Alexander:
Before the most illustrious Duchess, our common daughter, arrived here, my firm intention was to caress her and honour her, as is fitting, and not to fail in anything pertaining to singular affection. Now that Her Ladyship has come here, she has so satisfied me, by the virtues and worthy qualities that I find in her, that not only am I confirmed in this good disposition, but the desire and intention to do so have greatly increased in me; and so much the more as I see your Holiness, by a brief in your own hand, lovingly suggests this to me. Let Your Holiness be of good cheer, because I shall treat the said Duchess in such a wise that your Beatitude may know that I hold her Ladyship for the dearest thing that I have in the world.15
Lucrezia, whose ‘remote and solitary nature’ had already been remarked upon by the envoys who had accompanied her to Ferrara, kept herself to herself in her apartments in the Castello. She was aware of being watched, spied upon and judged in comparison with the Este women, not so much Isabella as her royal predecessor, the Duchess Eleonora. Ugly, clever and an excellent administrator, Eleonora had been popular and admired for her abilities and her piety. Even after death she would be the yardstick against which Lucrezia would now be measured. Accustomed as she was to the labyrinthine life of the Borgia court at Rome, where hostile outsiders spied on their every move, Lucrezia knew she had to tread warily and trust no one. Similarly, she was regarded with suspicion and hostility by many of the court who knew her and her family only too well by reputation. Di Prosperi noted that the wife of the Venetian visdomino and some other gentlewomen had visited her—‘but few in number, however’. ‘Madonna Leonora, Countess of La Mirandola’, had called but not been received and had returned affronted and annoyed, according to reports. Di Prosperi had, however, spoken to Lucrezia for the first time on 18 February and his impression was, he said, that she was of great goodness and prudence, far more than had been reported. And according to Madonna Theodora, a leading lady at court, she was most kind and very patient with those who served her. ‘And I believe,’ he added, ‘that she will make herself more at home the more she understands our ways.’
It was a difficult time for Lucrezia, whose household was being dismissed by Ercole and replaced by Ferrarese of his choice. Di Prosperi struggled to find out for Isabella exactly what was going on but largely in vain. He believed that they were awaiting final instructions from Alexander but it seemed that many had left and certain others were preparing to leave. Lucrezia had been visited in the camerino dal pozzolo, the room with the balcony, by several noble ladies but very few men, he said.16 A week later he was able to tell her that Geronima Borgia and the beautiful Catherina had left with two women singers ‘and therefore the greater part of those Spaniards of her household’. Adriana de Mila and Angela Borgia were still there, as well as the two Neapolitan sisters and their mother.
As if to compensate for the difficulties she was experiencing, Lucrezia’s relationship with Alfonso and Ercole was serene. Alfonso took her to watch him hunting in the Barco, the huge hunting ground and lake developed by Ercole behind the castle: falcons were flown, a hare was chased down and killed by ‘pardi’ (leopards, possibly cheetahs) and a wolf by dogs, something di Prosperi concluded, probably incorrectly since Lucrezia’s father and brother were such keen huntsmen, she had never seen. On her return, Ercole himself went to the gate of the Barco and accompanied her back into the castle, while the next day he took her in a carriage to see the nuns of the Estes’ favoured convent, Corpus Domini, and again the following day to mass at San Vido. ‘His affection and honour for her with such demonstrations is a great thing,’ di Prosperi commented. Moreover Alfonso never failed to sleep with her at night and to do everything to make her happy. ‘Yesterday he had decorated the Zardino del bagno where she could eat and wash her hair and [his favourite] il Barone, who is always with His Lordship and eats with him at table, accompanied her to the Castle.’17
This is a reference to the rooms and garden formerly occupied by Eleonora and later by Alfonso. Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, the Bolognese writer and scholar who had presented Ercole with a beautiful manuscript celebrating the marriage of Alfonso and Lucrezia, has left an enchanting description of this garden by the Castello where Lucrezia enjoyed a suite of bathrooms, with warming rooms and a necessarium furnished with marble benches on which to sit and marble steps leading down into a bath which would be lined with linen cloth for greater comfort. Bathing was a social occupation as well as a beauty treatment. Lucrezia and her ladies could spend long hours either bathing or sitting chatting in the warm room heated by a stove. Apart from the water drawn from the earth beneath the city, barrels of mud and water from spas near Padua at Abano and San Bartolommeo were brought in for health treatments. The garden itself enclosed an orchard, shrubs surrounded by box hedges, and a central pavilion surmounted by a gilded statue of Hercules, its lead roof resting on sixteen white marble columns, and a floor of inlaid coloured marble. Gilded bronze lions’ heads issued water into a marble basin surrounding the pavilion; four paths leading from it were paved in terracotta and shaded by roses growing on frames of crossed willow. Outside in the garden there were ornamental fruit trees, tall cypresses and jasmine; the walls were lined with vines growing out of borders of rosemary. There was a potager for vegetables and herbs, a flower garden planted with lilies, violas, carnations and white privet and a fishpond. Under a white marble loggia in summer tables would be placed for dining, decorated with flowers and herbs.18That winter, however, Lucrezia occupied rooms which had been specially redecorated for her in the Torre Marchesana of the Castello, while one of Alfonso’s rooms in the Torre San Paolo had been designed to make her feel at home with roundels containing the arms of the Pope, Cesare and the King of France; a ceiling featured the devices of Alfonso and Lucrezia on an azure ground.19
Even in these delightful surroundings Maria Bellonci has nonetheless represented Lucrezia as resentful and rebellious over the replacement of many of her former household. This seems unlikely for it was normal practice at the time for local servants and courtiers to replace the large contingent of‘foreigners’ accompanying the bride. A core of her household, and, more importantly for her, her ladies, remained with her, including her cousin Angela Borgia, her favourite Nicola, the much-loved Catherinella negra, Elisabetta senese, and others who accompanied her from Rome. They were, according to her wardrobe accounts, still with her in 1507,20 while Zambotti lists no fewer than twelve of the women – ladies and servants – who accompanied her from Rome and remained with her in Ferrara.21 Of the male members of her staff from Rome, no fewer than twenty remained with her. These included such important people as her secretary, Messer Cristoforo; her chaplain, the Bishop of Orta; Vincenzo Giordano, the master of her wardrobe; Sancho, her steward, the master of ceremonies at her table; and such officials as her credenciero; stable master; il bacilliere; her tailor and her cook, while Navarrico also remained. The men allotted to her by Ercole included two gentlemen in waiting, compagni, and the distinguished Jacobo Bendedei who acted as her seneschal, cooks, doctors and table officials, a financial controller, doorkeepers, pages, serving men and others.22 Six Ferrarese women were recruited to her household and twelve ‘donzelle’, or damsels, aged under eighteen, who included the daughters of local aristocrats, merchants and craftsmen. The list names ‘the daughter of Ercole, goldsmith, formerly a Jew’, and La Violante also ‘formerly a Jew’. Lucrezia’s court was to be a finishing school for these girls, where they were taught embroidery, dancing, courtly skills and Christian principles. Lucrezia looked out for husbands for them, often pursuing recalcitrant fiances beyond the city limits. Her household in total comprised 120 persons, or ‘boche’.23
Di Prosperi, who was certainly not prejudiced in Lucrezia’s favour although he was gradually won round to her, specifically denied that she made any fuss about the changes imposed on her. Talking of the new household arrangements he told Isabella: ‘And as far as I understand, Her Ladyship speaks as modestly as it is possible to describe [concerning this] nor has she ever shown any discontent or dislike and has even said that she is pleased that some of her own people remain and as far as the rest is concerned she has always wished for no more than what should please the Duke and her husband, in a manner that she has, they say, demonstrated goodness and prudence, and that her kind way of speaking has ensured the retention of her people.’24 Subtle and intelligent as she was, Lucrezia knew perfectly how to achieve her purposes by the use of charm rather than confrontation.
Angry confrontations, however, did take place between Alexander and Ercole over the amount of Lucrezia’s annual allowance. As was her wont in difficult times, Lucrezia retreated to the convent of Corpus Domini, ostensibly for Holy Week preceding Easter, while Alfonso went to the Certosa. From Rome, Alexander showered Lucrezia with papal indulgences for her and her household, while exchanging furious letters with Ercole over her income. Di Prosperi reported that Lucrezia’s allowance would probably be established at 10,000 ducats a year to cover the expenses of clothes, subsistence and salaries for her household. Alexander demanded 12,000 ducats while Ercole, typically, started the bidding at 8,000, arguing that that had been the sum allotted to his daughter Isabella.
By the end of March there were rumours that Lucrezia was pregnant, evidenced by her poor appetite: ‘She eats almost nothing and for this reason she rarely eats in public and rarely goes out, although the members of the family and the men and women of good family visit her,’ di Prosperi reported to Isabella on 2 April. She found the antics of the clown La Fertella, who ate at her table, extremely diverting and went out on occasion to dine with the rich Rizo del Tartufo and with Ferrante d’Este, one of her favourite brothers-in-law. She also gave a dinner for Ercole at which she exhibited the splendours of her credenza, a dresser displaying silver, and was well enough to watch the Corpus Christi procession, which was diverted to pass by her windows, and later the traditional races for St George’s Day. She continued, however, to be unwell, and the cautious Ercole did not inform the Pope of her pregnancy until 21 April.
On 3 May, Alfonso, accompanied by Sigismondo, was ordered by Ercole to go to meet the King of France and receive his prize, the county of Cotignola, donated by Louis as a sop to the Este for swallowing the Borgia marriage. On his departure Lucrezia also left Ferrara for Belriguardo, the magnificent Este villa which was to become one of her favourite retreats. As she told Ercole on 4 May, the day after her arrival, she had found it ‘much more beautiful than I could have imagined . . .’ Eight miles south-east of Ferrara, Belriguardo, of which little remains today, was one of the most celebrated palaces in Italy. It was huge, and had cost Ercole, according to Sabadino, ‘a mountain of gold’. It featured stabling for five hundred horses, secret passages, stately halls, marble loggias, box-lined gardens and a chapel painted by the celebrated Cosimo Tura within its battlemented walls. It contained a succession of vast frescoed halls, one lined with portraits of wise men, another with a painting of Ercole and his courtiers with their names and arms, and another room showing Ercole in Triumph, with what could be described as a veritable Who’s Who of the Herculean circle in the early 1490s. In one adjoining room he was depicted as a member of the Order of the Garter, again surrounded by his principal courtiers; the most famous room was the Sala di Psiche with its series of huge murals of the Roman myths. ‘And seeing the broilo [box garden] with its fruiting plants all in order and the huge garden, each enclosed by high and fine walls with their white battlements and red crenellations by this enormous and beautiful palace with its glazed and iron-grilled windows, I should think that a circuit of the place . . . would be more than a mile,’ Sabadino marvelled.25
Lucrezia was accompanied to Belriguardo by Ferrante, the idle but amusing brother of whom she was extremely fond – ‘ow much we laughed over your letters’, she was later to write to him. She also received regular reports from Sigismondo on his and Alfonso’s progress to France (Alfonso himself was a poor correspondent). Replying to thank him, she apologized for only being able to write him a postscript in her own hand – ‘the cause being my pregnancy . . .’26
Despite her friendly letters, Lucrezia was not only feeling increasingly unwell but also relieved to be out of Ferrara and away from the constant observation of courtiers like di Prosperi who criticized her for remaining away. ‘She has not moved from Belriguardo,’ he reported on 9 May, ‘and stays there very willingly.’ Worse, she only seemed to enjoy herself with such intimates as Angela Borgia who had been ill and stayed behind, but had joined Lucrezia, her ‘patrona’, ‘who only lets herself enjoy herself much unless with her and her other Spanish ladies as she has always done since she came here. And also I understand that in these days Messer Nicolo da Correzo [Niccolò da Correggio] was there wishing to visit her and was told that she was sleeping and he could not see her then. If these things are reported in such a way, I leave it to your ladyship what to think.’ Di Prosperi’s comments on ‘la patrona’ became increasingly critical:
So that Your Ladyship can understand what is happening here and the difference it makes between one patrona [the Duchess Eleonora] and another [Lucrezia] you must know that on Tuesday around the twenty-second hour, His Lordship your father mounted his horse and with a great part of the court and crossbowmen rode to the bridge of San Giorgio to meet Madonna who, returning from Belriguardo had dismounted at Cogomaro to eat at the house of Antonio Guarnero so that . . . it was the twenty-fourth hour before she arrived and then he accompanied her to the Zardino del Castello to the apartments of Don Alfonso where she now lodges. Yesterday after vespers he came to take her from her apartment and accompanied her to Sor [Sister] Lucia. I let Your Ladyship imagine in what a state we now are . . .
Ercole and the male members of the Este family were as charmed by Lucrezia as clearly as Isabella d’Este was not. Lucrezia’s early attempts to establish a relationship with her formidable sister-in-law, whom she knew to have considerable influence with her brothers, fell on stony ground. Writing to Lucrezia, whom she addressed as ‘Lady Lucretia Borgia’, as if unwilling to grant her the Este name, Isabella reported her safe arrival back in Mantua and the ‘convalescence’ of Francesco Gonzaga (who had clearly used illness as an excuse for his absence from the wedding). It was a polite, even gracious, but distant letter, unlike the one of the same date she wrote to Lucrezia’s cousin, Geronima Borgia, in which she gushed about ‘the love and friendship they had contracted’ and expressed the hope that Geronima would write to her ‘so that our mutual benevolence should not pass into oblivion’. 27 Lucrezia replied to Isabella with a graceful, ingratiating letter, signing herself, significantly, ‘Lucretia esten de borgia’. In May, still at Belriguardo, she wrote to Isabella recommending a certain ‘Jo. Jacomo Sculptore’, recently arrived from Rome, and asking her if she would let him make a portrait bust of her for Lucrezia’s pleasure.
But on her return to Ferrara, Lucrezia, possibly encouraged by Alexander, appeared to be digging her toes in. Ill and pregnant, conscious that she might be carrying the longed-for Este heir, she was proving rebellious, as her late arrival and keeping Ercole waiting reported above by di Prosperi showed. Accustomed to the Borgia courts, she well knew how to play her game and, as far as the core friends of her household were concerned, she succeeded. On 26 May, di Prosperi followed up his account of her arrival in Ferrara with the news that four people – ‘the first and the best’ – assigned to Lucrezia’s service had begged Ercole to let them leave her. He replied that they should await the return of Alfonso. ‘This,’ di Prosperi wrote, ‘proceeds from their being badly looked on and worse treated. Only the Spaniards find favour with her so that I suspect few of our people [i.e. Ferrarese] will stay with her, remembering as they do a greater Lady than her [Duchess Eleonora] and having been kindly received . . .’
Lucrezia was longing to leave Ferrara again, this time for the Este villa at Medelana, but her departure was delayed by the dangerous illness of her beloved Angela Borgia. So she remained, staying in the beautiful Palazzo Belfiore on the north-eastern confines of Ferrara, probably because of redecorations to her apartments in the Giardino del Castello. Belfiore was mostly used as a summer residence away from the unhealthy heat and, no doubt, smells, of central Ferrara. Only four displaced marble columns remain of this building, which once stood on an island in the Barco. It was described by the Bolognese writer Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti as ‘a habitation of the most splendid and marvellous beauty, and of the most beautiful architecture that ever could be built by the engineer’s art’. There are now no traces of the loggiaed central courtyard with its cycle of enchanting frescoes showing Alberto d’Este and his court hunting and feasting in the meadows then surrounding what was his hunting retreat but now enclosed within Ercole’s new quarter. Other rooms showed more hunting motifs with stags, lions and boar; there were scenes from Ercole’s life, even a representation of an elephant which had apparently visited Ferrara; but the most notable series glorified the life of the Duchess Eleonora and her court, playing chess, dancing to the sounds of drums and pipes and feasting. Eleonora’s formal entry into Ferrara as a bride and her marriage ceremony were depicted there, all reminders to Lucrezia of Este expectations.28
Lucrezia was still there in June when Cesare made another violent demonstration of his Borgia nature in a lightning strike on Urbino, surprising Guidobaldo who was expecting him to attack Camerino more than one hundred miles to the south, and who just had time to flee without any possessions before Cesare marched into Urbino on the morning of 21 June. News of Cesare’s ’s taking of Urbino sent a shock wave through the courts of Italy, not least in Mantua and Ferrara. With only four horsemen as companions, Guidobaldo had a nightmare journey to Mantua where Elisabetta was still staying, stopping only to consult Ercole who was at his villa of Monastirolo. As di Prosperi wrote to Isabella, ‘the sad news of the Illustrious Lord Duke of Urbino has caused such wonder among all the people [here] that it was two days before anyone believed it, but confirmation from all sides has left the populace in the greatest sadness and displeasure that you can imagine’. Lucrezia, he said, was most distressed, bearing in mind the honour and welcome she had received in Urbino from Guidobaldo and pitying the Duchess. ‘I do not believe her reaction is simulated,’ he added, ‘because the case merits condemnation unto the gates of hell: and these Spaniards of hers do not disagree.’29 Writing on the same day to her sister-in law Chiara Gonzaga, Isabella reported the arrival there of Guidobaldo ‘in his doublet’ having only just succeeded in escaping with his life. Calling Cesare’s attack ‘unthought of and cursed’, she said they had all been ‘so shocked, confused and grieved [by it] that we ourselves hardly know where we are’.
Isabella was panic-stricken that she too might share her sister-in-law’s fate. The fact that she had provided shelter, even briefly, for the family of the Duke of Urbino, was bound to arouse Cesare’s ever-alert suspicions. The arrival of an envoy sent by Cesare, named only by Isabella as ‘Francesc’ but probably Francesco Troche, who was intimately concerned in Cesare’s plans, frightened her further. Convinced he was a spy, she wrote immediately to Francesco Gonzaga who had left to join the French court, asking him to send a letter favourable to Cesare which she could show to this man. Gonzaga as usual had dawdled and then produced what Isabella considered to be an inadequate epistle. She therefore drew up another one and forwarded it to him, entreating him to keep the fact that she had done so a secret. This time she included Lucrezia as well as Cesare in her suspicions: ‘so that knowledge of it should not come to the ears of either the Duchess or the Duke, so that they should mistrust those words which I artfully inserted in the letter to give greater hope [of our loyalty] to il Valentino’.30
Only Machiavelli, in Urbino with a Florentine delegation for his first interview with Cesare on 24 June, was impressed, taking away an idea of the twenty-five-year-old leader which he later transmuted into his famous Chapter VII of The Prince: ‘This Lord is truly splendid and magnificent, and in war there is no enterprise so great that it does not appear small to him; in the pursuit of glory and lands he never rests nor recognizes fatigue or danger. He arrives in one place before it is known that he has left another; he is popular with his soldiers and he has collected the best men in Italy; these things make him victorious and formidable, particularly when added to permanent good fortune.’31
For Lucrezia, Cesare’s coup was profoundly embarrassing, adding to the suspicion with which she was regarded by the Ferrarese and, indeed, the Gonzaga. Yet no doubt she was secretly proud of her brother’s daring successes which, far from undermining her own position, actually enhanced it. Her existence guaranteed the safety of Ferrara, but it must also have increased her sense of isolation and her dependence on the Spanish core of her household. Alfonso was with the King of France, Ercole was making his way there and she was having a difficult pregnancy. As the summer wore on, her health grew worse; in mid July an epidemic of fever reached Ferrara, and in her weakened state Lucrezia became seriously ill. On 11 July, di Prosperi reported that the previous Saturday after eating a little she had vomited and had a fever and that ‘this evening there was great disquiet about her’. Ercole and Alfonso were informed. ‘God preserve her because it would not be to anyone’s purpose that she should die for now,’ he added cynically. From Belfiore on 13 July she wrote to Ercole, thanking him for his letter written from Piacenza en route to join Louis XII in Milan. ‘If anything could give me swift relief from this my present indisposition,’ she wrote, ‘it has been your most welcome letter.’ Since the previous Saturday she had been overtaken by fever and had felt too ill to write to inform him of her illness, certain that Gian Luca Pozzi (who was always with her, hoping for her help in obtaining a cardinal’s hat from her father) would inform him.32 She suffered a severe paroxysm, then another, this time less severe. Alfonso arrived to console her, closely followed by Sigismondo.33 By 24 July she was still suffering paroxysms accompanied by fever and the doctors were doing everything they could both to cure her and to save the baby. Alfonso slept every night in a room next to hers and was always there when she took food.34 Francesco Troche paid her a call en route from the King of France to the Pope. The Pope sent his favourite doctor, the Bishop of Venosa, from Rome, while Francesc Remolins, known to the Italians as Remolino, came from Cesare’s camp for the latest news.35
Doctors were ordered to her side by Ercole, the Pope and Cesare, and with their help she would try to get well, she told Ercole on 28 July. In Rome Alexander characteristically made use of her illness in his negotiations with Ercole over her allowance, telling Costabili that it had been caused by the deficit in her allowance which should be made up from 10,000 to 12,000 ducats so that she could pay her debts.36 Cesare’s contribution to his sister’s health was to write her a letter from Urbino on 20 July announcing the imminent surrender of Camerino and its lords, the Varani, yet another family connection of the Este. The fact that he could do this is an indication that Lucrezia was far from being as shocked by his aggressive coups as she pretended to be:
‘Illustrious Lady and dearest Sister,’ he wrote:
I know nothing could be better medicine for Your Excellency in your present illness than the good news which I have to impart. I must tell you that I have just had information that Camerino will yield. We trust that on receiving this news your condition will rapidly improve, and that you will inform us at once of it. For your indisposition prevents us from deriving any pleasure from this and other news. We ask you to tell the illustrious Duke Don Alfonso, your husband, our brother-in-law, at once, as, owing to want of time, we have not been able to write to him direct.
Your Excellency’s brother, who loves you better than himself . . .
But this cheering news did not cure Lucrezia whose condition over the following days deteriorated. On 31 July, di Prosperi reported that she was very weak and the general opinion was that both she and her child would die. She suffered a severe nosebleed but seemed better to the extent that she expressed a wish to go to Belriguardo but this the doctors would not consider. Many of her ladies, di Prosperi reported, were also ill, and Madonna Cecharella mortally so. But by the time both Cesare and Alfonso rushed to her bedside on 3 August, she was well enough to lie dressed upon her bed where she received them, as she reported to Ercole three days later. Disguised as a knight of St John, Cesare was on his way with three other horsemen (including Troche and Remolins) to see Louis XII, with whom he had a secret and vital agreement, in Milan where the King was surrounded by Cesare’s enemies. Alfonso arrived shortly afterwards and, according to Lucrezia, the three of them enjoyed ‘pleasant conversation’ for two hours. The next day the two men left in the direction of Reggio.
Lucrezia, however, recovered only briefly at the sight of her brother and husband. She suffered a relapse and the fever and the ‘flux’ continued, although her brave letters to Ercole gave no indication of the danger she was in. Many of her doctors too were sick, Francesco Castello grievously so, while another, Francesco Carri, later died. By the beginning of September she was seriously ill, suffering fits of sweating interspersed with chills every day. Francesco Castello told Ercole that only giving birth would relieve her; the Bishop of Venosa wrote unsympathetically to Rome of ‘accidenti di animo’(fits of the spirit) and hysterical phenomena. On 3 and 4 September her fits were so severe that Castello could only recommend her to God’s grace; then, on the evening of the 5th, she was seized with a convulsion which caused her to arch her back, as screaming, she gave birth to a stillborn, seven-month-old daughter. Puerperal fever consumed her and the doctors despaired; two days later, at dawn on September, Cesare made a sudden appearance, having ridden furiously from the French court at Milan, accompanied by his brother-in-law the Cardinal d’Albret and thirteen gentlemen. Later that morning the doctors took the decision to bleed Lucrezia; to distract her Cesare held her foot and told jokes, even succeeding in making her laugh, but that night her condition deteriorated. Castello did not sleep, not daring to leave her, and in the morning she was given communion. However, as the morning went on she seemed better and an exhausted Castello told the inquiring di Prosperi that if things went on in this way until the next day he believed she would survive.37 Cesare, hoping for the best for his adored sister, left as swiftly and as secretly as he had arrived. Couriers rode furiously between Ferrara and Rome bearing the latest news of Lucrezia. In Rome on 8 September, Costabili reported that Alexander had heard ‘with great grief of the stillbirth of his daughter Duchess Lucrezia, but concluded that the grief would have been considerably greater if the child had been a boy’.38 Saraceni, who had also seen the Pope, added that ‘he much praised the prince Alfonso for his great tenderness towards her’.39 Ercole, however, as a letter dictated by Lucrezia of 4 September reveals, had not ceased to press her over his hopes for a cardinal’s hat for his favourite, Gian Luca Pozzi. Yet on the news of her stillbirth he had rushed to her side from Reggio where he had been conferring with il Valentino.
Lucrezia had failed in her duty to provide the Estes with a male heir and her sufferings were by no means over. On 13 September she had yet another relapse, so severe apparently that she felt her own pulse and exclaimed, ‘Oh good, I am dead.’ She added a codicil to her will which she had brought with her from Rome, to the benefit of Rodrigo Bisceglie. Rumours ran through the courts of Italy that she had been poisoned, the theory being that her failure to provide the Este with an heir had caused them to wish to rid themselves of the hated Borgia. This was unfair; not only had both Alfonso and Ercole expressed the greatest concern for her but Alfonso had vowed that, if Lucrezia survived, he would make a pilgrimage on foot to the shrine of the Madonna di Loreto. In the event, he changed his mind and went more comfortably by boat with Alexander’s specific dispensation from his original vow. By early October, Lucrezia was considered cured; while Alfonso left for Loreto, she took her court to the convent of Corpus Domini where, for three or four days, she intended to fulfil, out of the public eye, a vow made during her illness to wear only grey.40
Elsewhere in Italy, Lucrezia’s family was approaching the zenith of its power. As the year came to a close Cesare committed one more great act of terror which has resounded down history, dubbed by his contemporaries ‘a most beautiful deception’. No one knows whether Lucrezia, sick as she was in the summer of 1502, had been aware of Cesare’s plans to extend and consolidate his position in Italy, nor of the incredible risks he had knowingly run. The danger lay in his own success in the takeover of the lands of the Church, planned from the day he was made Gonfalonier. By the end of June 1502 most of the former vicariates north of the Campagna were in his hands, Camerino was about to fall and Sinigallia, a small town on the Adriatic, was marked down for destruction. Around Rome all the lands of the Roman barons except those of the Orsini, his allies for the moment, had been taken over by the Borgias. Within the Papal States, Cesare’s chosen area of operation, only Bologna, Perugia, Città di Castello and Fermo remained outside his control and, as such, obvious targets. Cesare’s lightning attack on Urbino had marvellously concentrated the minds of the lords of these cities – most of whom were paid captains of Cesare’s – on the fate that could befall them too. At a meeting at Lake Trasimene, shortly after Guidobaldo’s overthrow, between Vitellozzo Vitelli of Città di Castello and Gian Paolo Baglioni of Perugia (both of them Cesare’s captains), grand words were spoken about the ‘great betrayal’ (of Urbino) executed by the Duke (Cesare) and they began ‘to recognize his marrano faith more clearly’.41
Once again the key for the Borgia advance was the French King’s desire for the Kingdom of Naples. Throughout July and August, while in Rome Alexander talked openly and ominously of the Orsini and Vitellozzo Vitelli, and Cesare, as secret and as elusive as ever, went hunting with leopards in the hills round Urbino, his face covered with thin silk against the flies, Francesco Troche was working to persuade Louis to abandon his protection of the Orsini and the Bentivoglio of Bologna in return for Borgia support for his Naples campaign. Isabella d’Este, far more politically acute and cool-headed than her husband, had wind of this and warned Francesco to be careful:
It is generally believed that His Most Christian Majesty has some understanding with Valentino, so I beg of you to be careful not to use words which may be repeated to him, because in these days we do not know who is to be trusted. There is a report here . . . that Your Excellency has spoken angry words against Valentino before the Most Christian King and the Pope’s servants . . . and they will doubtless reach the ears of Valentino, who, having already shown that he does not scruple to conspire against those of his own blood [a reference to the death of Gandia], will, I am certain, not hesitate to plot against your person . . . it would be perfectly easy to poison Your Excellency . . . 42
Isabella herself was more cynical in her reactions to Cesare’s ‘nefarious’ crime against Guidobaldo and Elisabetta: the day before she wrote this warning letter to Francesco she had written to her brother Ippolito in Rome asking him to intercede with Cesare to help her acquire for herself two statues of Venus and Cupid which had been in the palace at Urbino. Cesare, who was in the process of packing up all Guidobaldo’s treasures, including his father Federigo’s celebrated library, and sending them to the Rocca di Forli, instantly obliged, sending a special messenger to deliver the statues to the cupidinous Isabella.
Cesare’s unexpected arrival at the King’s court at Milan and the ostentatiously friendly welcome accorded him by Louis, frightened his enemy lords gathered there. Even Francesco Gonzaga who, on the day of Cesare’s arrival, had unwisely boasted to the Venetian envoy that he would fight a hand-to-hand duel with ‘that bastard son of a priest’, hastened to make his peace with il Valentino. ‘Today we have caressed and embraced each other, offering each to the other as good brothers, and thus together with the Most Christian Majesty we have spent all this day dancing and feasting . . .,’ he reassured Isabella.
Cesare’s next objective was to be the Bentivoglio, the Este in-laws and rulers of Bologna, another papal vicariate. While Cesare laid plans for the next campaign, in Rome Alexander was intent on his long vendetta to avenge the death of Juan Gandia. On 25 September, Giulio Orsini told him to his face that the French had warned Cardinal Orsini at Milan that it was the Pope’s intention to ruin the house of Orsini. The next day the clan gathered for a family conference at Todi which could not bode well for the Borgias. This was followed by a meeting at Cardinal Orsini’s castle of La Magione, attended not only by the principal members of the Orsini family (one of whom, Paolo, was in Cesare’s employ), but a powerful group of Cesare’s captains who feared for their states, namely Vitellozzo Vitelli of Città di Castello, Oliverotto of Fermo and Gian Paolo Baglioni of Perugia, while the lords of threatened or surrendered cities – Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Giovanni Bentivoglio and Pandolfo Petrucci of Siena sent representatives. Baglioni warned the conspirators that if they did not take preventive action against il Valentino they would be ‘one by one devoured by the dragon’. The situation was fraught with danger for Cesare: on 7 October the revolt against him of the key fortress of San Leo in Urbino jolted the men at La Magione into action and on the 9th a League was signed against Cesare.
Machiavelli was at Imola with a Florentine delegation to Cesare when the news of the League of La Magione arrived. He had the support of the King of France, Cesare told him, boasting that ‘events would show what kind of men they are and who I am’. He moved swiftly, raising troops and negotiating separate agreements with his conspiring captains who even agreed to help him regain Urbino. Guidobaldo, who had returned to Urbino following the revolt of San Leo, scarcely had time to gather up the few possessions Cesare had left him before going on the run again, this time to Venice. He also moved on Camerino, where the eighty-two-year-old Giulio Cesare Varano was strangled and his lordship then bestowed as a duchy by Alexander on his son, Giovanni Borgia. He made separate agreements with the Bentivoglio, Orsini and the other captains, all of whom agreed to continue fighting for him. Machiavelli sized up the sinister situation with his usual perspicacity:
As to the suggested understanding . . . I do not augur well of it. For when I consider the . . . parties concerned, I see on the one hand Duke Cesare, vigorous, courageous, confident in his future, blessed with exceptional fortune, backed by the favour of the Pope and King . . . Confronting him, we have a group of lords who, even while they were his friends, were in anxiety for their possessions, and fearful of his growing power; and now, having thus injured him, and become his declared enemies, naturally more defensive still. So that I fail to understand how, on the one part, such injury can be expected to find forgiveness . . .43
But Machiavelli, acute observer though he was, failed to penetrate the secrecy of Cesare’s intentions before il Valentino rode out of Imola in heavy snow to spend Christmas at Cesena, the capital of his province of Romagna. There, on Christmas morning, people were shocked to see the decapitated body of Cesare’s former Governor of the Romagna and long-standing follower, Don Ramiro de Lorqua, displayed in the piazza, his black-bearded head impaled on a lance beside it. The ostensible reason given for his death was that Ramiro had been demoted by Cesare as a result of his unpopular treatment of the people of the Romagna and was being made an example of; but the real reason for his execution, as Alexander confessed later in Rome to the Venetian envoy, was that Cesare considered him a traitor for plotting with the conspirators against him. Once again it was an effective, deliberate act of terror. Cesare knew that the time had come for the final round in the contest with his condottieri and had already set the stage at Sinigallia, which his captains had agreed to take in his name from Guidobaldo’s sister, Giovanna, who ruled as regent in the name of her son, Giovanni Maria della Rovere.
On 26 December, Cesare set off with his personal guard down the Via Emilia to meet his captains there, having sent small bodies of troops southward to mislead the conspirators into underestimating the strength of his forces. He had ordered them to withdraw their troops from the town so that he could quarter his own guard there, and that all but one of the gates should be locked. Outside the town the condottieri came to meet him, nervously surprised to see that he was wearing full battle armour although fighting was not expected. Cesare greeted them cordially, riding with them into Sinigallia past the drawn-up lines of his heavy cavalry. Behind them the gates were quietly closed. Nervous but unsuspecting the conspirators accompanied Cesare into a house specially selected for the purpose by Michelotto on the pretext of a meeting. There the conspirators were seized as they sat in their chairs round a table, their hands bound behind them. At two o’clock on the morning of New Year’s Day, Oliverotto and Vitellozzo, seated back-to-back on a bench, were garrotted on Michelotto’s orders. Cesare took the three Orsini – Paolo (father-in-law of Geronima Borgia), Francesco, Duke of Gravina (once considered a possible husband for Lucrezia) and Roberto – with him to meet a similar fate on the road to Rome, strangled at the castle of Sarteano on 18 January 1503. As he left, Cesare caught sight of Machiavelli. ‘This,’ he told him, ‘is what I wished to tell at Urbino, but I never trusted the secret to anyone, thus the occasion having come to me, I have known very well how to use it . . .’ In Rome, encouraged by Cesare’s success, Alexander arrested the aged Cardinal Orsini along with other family connections, including Rinaldo Orsini, Archbishop of Florence, and sent them to Sant’Angelo.
Throughout Italy Cesare’s coup was regarded not only as a justifiable punishment for treachery but as a masterstroke. Machiavelli called it an ‘admirable deed’, the King of France ‘an act worthy of a Roman hero’, a later anti-Borgia historian, Paolo Giovio, ‘a most beautiful deception’. Isabella d’Este hastened to congratulate him with exaggerated expressions of affection, sending him a hundred carnival masks ‘because we believe that after the strains and fatigues which you have undergone in these your glorious undertakings, you should also find time to amuse yourself’. 44 She was still deep in negotiation over the projected marriage between her son, two-year-old Federico (born 17 May 1500), and Cesare’s daughter Luisa, of exactly the same age. But her real sentiments were echoed by di Prosperi in a cautious reference written on 6 January 1503 to ‘the sad news from the Romagna’.
In Ferrara no one remarked upon any reaction from Lucrezia whose existence had protected the Este from her brother’s depredations. She and Alfonso danced and feasted through the first days of carnival. The Borgias were now at their apogee and Cesare’s successes underlined the necessity of propitiating them. For Lucrezia this had a satisfactory material outcome: the vexed question of her allowance had at last been settled to her satisfaction.45