‘Furthermore, although you have now lost your very great father . . . this is not the first blow which you have suffered at the hands of your cruel and malevolent destiny . . . you would do well not to allow anyone to assume, as some might be led to infer in present circumstances, that you bewail not so much your loss but what may betide your present fortunes . . .’
– Pietro Bembo to the grieving Lucrezia on the death of Alexander VI, 22 August 1503
Young (she was still not quite twenty-three), beautiful and now restored to health, Lucrezia, with her close group of ladies, Angela Borgia, Nicola and Elisabetta senese, were the focus of court life. Since Ercole was a widower, she was already known as ‘la duchessa’ and she was the centre of attention in Ferrara. With renewed confidence in herself and a strong sense of having returned from the brink of death, Lucrezia set out to enjoy life. Duke Ercole had given in over the question of her allowance: on 10 January, di Prosperi reported that she was to have 6,000 ducats for herself and 6,000 for the clothing and salaries of her household – the 12,000 ducats which Alexander had been insisting upon. She felt free to enjoy herself, often occupying the place of honour as she did on 19 February when she and Ercole presided over a comedy by Plautus in the Sala Grande. Seated alone with Ercole in front of two tribunals, one occupied by gentlewomen, the other by gentlemen and citizens, she was described by the local chronicler as ‘most richly dressed with great jewels’.
Isabella’s principal spy, El Prete, was in Ferrara for carnival that year, apparently accompanying his master, Niccolò da Correggio. He was adept at telling Isabella what she wanted to hear, usually to Lucrezia’s discredit. She had appeared at a ball in the house of the Roverella, apparently in a bad temper, ‘which it seems she is always in nowadays’. She was always in conversation with Don Giulio, perhaps her favourite, as he was his father’s. She danced the torch dance, ‘ballo da la torza’, with Ferrante, and then Giulio, and her last dance with Alfonso. El Prete liked to make out how difficult Lucrezia was, dining alone with her beloved Angela Borgia and being disagreeable to her Ferrarese ladies. On one occasion, he said, two of them refused to put on masks: ‘she rebuked them so that they were reduced to tears’.1 More honest and less sycophantic than El Prete, di Prosperi reported earlier on Lucrezia’s efforts to familiarize herself with Ferrara and its ways. She had dined at the monastery of San Giorgio and at the Certosa: ‘and I understand that every Saturday she wishes to visit one of our convents to see the places and enjoy our town better than she has up till now’.2 Even Isabella’s sister-in law, Laura Bentivoglio, married to Giovanni Gonzaga, gave her a good report: ‘Her manners and comportment seem to me all gracious and friendly and happy,’ she wrote, adding that Lucrezia had expressed herself as anxious that Isabella should write to her sometimes ‘and behave in a more intimate manner than hitherto’.
Strangely enough, the charge of being too formal had been levied against Lucrezia by Isabella the previous year – ‘there is no need to use such terms of reverence [to me] being your cordial sister’3 – but the rivalry between the two, especially in terms of clothes, remained. Lucrezia questioned Laura Bentivoglio closely about Isabella’s wardrobe and particularly the manner in which she dressed her hair. Isabella spent a fortnight at Ferrara that spring, in anticipation of which, according to a malicious later report by Cattaneo, Lucrezia had pawned some of her jewellery to pay for splendid clothes to dazzle her sister-in-law and had asked her father to give her the year’s income of the bishopric of Ferrara.4 Lucrezia welcomed her sister-in-law to Ferrara with a great show of graciousness, organizing Spanish dances to the sound of tambourines, and a keyboard competition between Vincenzo da Modena and the Duke’s organist, Antonio dall’Organo; and with her she attended a series of elaborately staged miracle plays ordered by Ercole to be performed in the Duomo. After Isabella returned to Mantua, Lucrezia wrote her a letter of exaggerated friendliness: ‘It would be difficult for me to express the supreme pleasure and consolation which I recently received from your most welcome letter,’ she wrote on 17 May, ‘particularly for the news of your most pleasant journey and . . . safe arrival’, going on to insist on how much she missed Isabella, particularly now that Alfonso had ‘left for Marina’.
But, far from feeling bereft and lonely in the absence of Isabella and, more significantly, Alfonso, Lucrezia as the beautiful young Duchess had become the focus and inspiration of a court of literary young men. Ercole was now old, and devoted rather to music and the theatre, while Alfonso, despite a humanistic education, inclined to the visual arts and was uninterested in literature. On the announcement of her betrothal, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti had composed Colloquium ad Ferrarem urbem in honour of the wedding and sent two magnificently illuminated copies, one to Ercole and one to Lucrezia, the previous November. Lucrezia’s arrival in Ferrara and her marriage had been the occasion for the most extravagant epithets by poets, including Ludovico Ariosto, who had composed an epithalamium for her marriage and was later to complete his masterwork,Orlando Furioso, the romantic epic poem on the Este which featured Lucrezia. Her arrival had also been celebrated by the Latin poets, father and son Tito and Ercole Strozzi, and her circle included the disreputable poet Antonio Tebaldeo (then in the service of Ippolito but who later became her secretary), and expanded to include the great Venetian printer Aldus Manutius (who at one point made her the executor of his will) and the celebrated humanist Giangiorgio Trissino. Lucrezia took their eulogies, which included describing her as ‘most beautiful virgin’ and comparing her with the swan in the famous frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia, with a large pinch of salt, but she developed a close friendship with Ercole Strozzi and through him a passionate relationship with one of the most famous young writers in Italy, Pietro Bembo.
Ercole Strozzi was a member of the Florentine banking family exiled by the Medici and now established in Ferrara. Despite being so lame that he had to walk with a crutch, he was an intense womanizer and a natural romantic, with a taste for dangerous love affairs. He had been in love for ten years with a woman who was not only married but also had a lover described by contemporaries as ‘vir magnus’, a powerful man. Strozzi was captivated by Lucrezia and soon became her closest male confidant in Ferrara and the facilitator of her love affairs, a dangerous course which may have led to his violent death five years later. Ercole had succeeded his father (who had made himself deeply hated by the populace for his extortions) as Giudice dei XII Savi, leader of the principal administrative council of Ferrara, and as such was a prominent citizen with easy access to the court.
Strozzi became indispensable to Lucrezia; like her he adored extravagant clothes and, although coming from a rich family, was perennially short of money. On frequent visits to Venice (still, after the fall of Constantinople, the main source of textiles from the Ottoman Empire) he acquired wonderful materials for her wardrobe, as witnessed by repeated entries in her wardrobe account books, beginning as early as July 1502, when he provided lengths of the much-prized white ‘tabi’.5 Despite the lavish trousseau she had brought with her from Rome, Strozzi’s contributions feature on almost every page of her wardrobe accounts for the years 1502—3. Encouraged perhaps by Ercole’s concessions over her allowance, she was generous in providing clothing: on 19 June 1503 she had four doublets for Cesare’s lute players made up, and a robe for ‘Zoanmaria the Jew’, one of his musicians. Two yellow velvet doublets were made for woodwind players (piffari) to be sent to Cesare that year. There were skirts and other clothing for Angela Borgia, Girolama, Nicola, Catherinella and Camilla. On 9 August 1502, two capes in purple (paonazzo) satin were ordered for Giovanni Borgia and Rodrigo Bisceglie. From the same source it is apparent that Lucrezia in return loaned Strozzi money.
On 15 January 1503, Ercole Strozzi gave a ball for her, and it was at this ball that she renewed her brief acquaintance with the most famous of her lovers, Pietro Bembo. A member of a distinguished Venetian family, Bembo was well known in Ferrara, where his father Bernardo had acted asvisdomino, or co-ruler, a deeply resented office imposed on the Ferrarese after they lost the war with Venice in 1484. Pietro had stayed on in Ferrara for a while after his father returned to Venice; the cultivated atmosphere of Ercole’s court suited his temperament better than the stern, hardheaded mercantile Republic. Bembo’s closest friend in Ferrara was Ercole Strozzi from whom he had heard about Lucrezia long before he met her. Since October 1502 he had been staying in Strozzi’s villa at Ostellato and had briefly entertained her there in mid November, writing afterwards to Ercole that he wished she had stayed longer, describing her as ‘such a beautiful and elegant woman who is not superstitious about anything’.6 After the ball in January, he boasted to his brother Carlo of how many compliments ‘la duchessa’ had paid him. ‘Every day,’ he added, ‘I find her a still worthier lady, seeing she has far excelled all my expectations, great though they were after hearing so many reports of her and most of all from Messer Ercole . . .’7 Ercole’s reports to Bembo about Lucrezia, which Bembo called ‘the Lucretian letters’, continued after Pietro left again for Ostellato. According to one authority8 Bembo was inspired to write verses in praise of Lucrezia which were secretly passed to her by his literary friends in Ferrara, Ariosto and, particularly, Ercole Strozzi.
Strozzi deliberately fanned the flames of Bembo’s passion; romantic adoration for Lucrezia became a cult between the two young poets. Very possibly he urged Lucrezia on in the relationship; romantic intrigue excited him and, as later became obvious, there was little love lost between him and Alfonso. Lucrezia entered into the teasing of Bembo with delight: on 24 April she addressed a letter to him in her distinctive hand but when he opened it there was only another letter from Strozzi. A month later, on 25 May, Lucrezia copied out in her own hand a love poem by the fifteenth-century Aragonese poet Lope de Estuniga, Yo piense si me muriese . . . The poem barely translates into English, a language with so different a rhythm:
I think were I to die
And with my wealth of pain
Cease longing,
Such great love to deny
Could make the world remain
Unloving.
When I consider this,
Death’s long delay is all
I must desire,
Since reason tells me bliss
Is felt by one in thrall
To such a fire.
Bembo responded with a poem of his own, in Tuscan, the language of his hero Petrarch, in which he described himself as caught in the beauty of Lucrezia’s blonde hair, which in his presence she let down loose on her shoulders and then with ‘two hands of immeasurable beauty’ bound up again and with them his heart. Three hundred years later, viewing what he called ‘the prettiest love letters in the world’ in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, Lord Byron stole a blonde thread from the lock of Lucrezia’s hair which she must have sent Bembo in response to this passionate poem. With this and another sonnet, Bembo sent Lucrezia the first volume of his famous prose poem Gli Asolani, ‘hich I received this very hour’.9 Lucrezia’s response was to ask him to suggest a motto for a medallion which she was thinking of having made featuring flames ‘according to that most subtle and most apt suggestion you gave me’, ‘. . . nothing can prevent me from ever adoring your name’, Bembo replied by courier that same day. ‘As for the fire on the gold medallion which your Ladyship has sent me with the request that I should devise a motto for inscription, I can think of no nobler location than the soul. Wherefore you might have it thus inscribed: EST ANIMUM . . .’10
Passionate but still apparently platonic: some time after this letter was written Bembo went to Ferrara to meet Lucrezia when they had an intimate conversation and may have exchanged declarations of love. This might be interpreted from Bembo’s subsequent letter written on 19 June from Ostellato: ‘Gazing these past days into my crystal [heart] of which we spoke during the last evening I paid my respects to your Ladyship, I have read therein, glowing at its centre, these lines I now send to you . . .’11 The sonnet Poi ch’ogni ardir was an expression of physical passion, still apparently unfulfilled. Lucrezia’s reply mirrored his: ‘Messer Pietro mio. Concerning the desire you have to hear from me regarding the counterpart of your or our crystal as it may be rightly reputed and termed, I cannot think what else to say or imagine save that it has an extreme affinity of which the like perhaps has never been equalled in any age . . . And let it be a gospel everlasting.’ The situation was clearly becoming serious, even dangerous; from now on her name was to be ‘f.f.’ Bembo’s reply was passionate: ‘Now is my crystal [heart] more precious to me than all the pearls of the Indian seas, and surely you have acted most mercifully in granting parity such as you have given it, and such company. God knows no human thing could be so dear to me as this certainty . . .’12 There has been much unresolved speculation, as to the precise meaning of ‘f.f.’ Two years later Lucrezia had a portrait medallion struck with, on the reverse, a blindfolded cupid bound to an oak tree and with the motto ‘FPHFF’. All that can be ascertained with any degree of certainty is that the need to use a pseudonym reflected the increasing depth of the relationship and perhaps also the dangers which this implied for both in Ferrara where the Este were all-powerful.
For the poet, unattached, ardent and living in the luxury of the Strozzi villa among the waterways and flat fields of Ostellato, twenty-five miles from Ferrara, there was no impediment to romantic dreams. But for Lucrezia, living in the enclosed circle of the court and constantly spied upon, life was more complicated. And in the distance, but always dominating the Italian political scene, were her father and brother. In his next letter written from Ostellato in late June, Bembo refers specifically to Lucrezia’s ‘vexations’ and ‘distress’ and ‘these present cares.’13 It is unclear from this whether these may have been connected with Alfonso’s return to Ferrara (he had been away in May) or to Lucrezia’s own family situation.
At the beginning of 1503 Cesare’s fortunes, which seemed so bright, were actually on the cusp. Where his success had rested on his alliance with Louis XII, the King now blocked his path. Cesare had grown too powerful and Louis was unwilling to allow him to extend his dominion over either Bologna or, more particularly, Florence. Venice and the French-held Duchy of Milan obstructed his expansion northward; Cesare’s only real option was to turn southward. And, as always, the Kingdom of Naples loomed large in his calculations; here it was now Spain which was calling the shots. In a series of victories in April, the French in the Kingdom were routed by the Spanish forces under their brilliant commander, Gonsalvo da Cordoba; on the 13th Gonsalvo entered Naples. Alexander, Iberian at heart, had never really liked the French alliance, nor, rightly, had he trusted Louis. To the Bolognese envoy he made it plain that the French could not rely on the Borgias to win the Kingdom back for them: ‘We are resolved not to lose what we have acquired,’ he said, adding piously, ‘because we see that it is God’s will that the Spaniards have been victorious; and if God wills it thus, we must not wish it otherwise.’14
Unlike his father, Cesare kept his counsel as he considered his future. As Machiavelli was later to write of him in The Prince: ‘When the Duke had become very powerful and in part secure against present perils, since he was armed as he wished and had in part destroyed those forces that, as neighbours, could harm him, he still, if he intended to pursue his course, had before him the problem of the King of France, because he knew that the King, who too late had become aware of his mistake, would not tolerate further conquest. For this reason the Duke was looking for new alliances and wavering in his dealings with France . . .’ The first public sign of the way Cesare’s thoughts were tending came with the nomination of the new cardinals early in May: five of the nine were Catalans, either close relations or dependants of the Borgias. There was not one Frenchman.
Lucrezia naturally had her own sources of information in the Borgia camp, although it is unlikely that she was ever consulted by Cesare, now totally dominant in the partnership with his father. In February she had a new source of information in Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, recently returned from Rome where he had enjoyed an affair with Sancia, now once again unaccountably confined to Sant’Angelo by Alexander. There were rumours, as always with il Valentino, that Ippolito had fled Rome from fear of Cesare although it is unlikely that Cesare would have cared what Sancia did, powerless as she was but still his sworn enemy. Moreover, Alexander specifically expressed his delight at Lucrezia’s friendship with Ippolito: ‘She spends the night with Don Alfonso and the day with the Cardinal d’Este, who was with her all day and accompanied her wherever she went,’ he declared proudly to Costabili, adding that the three of them were ‘three bodies and one sole mind’.15
Lucrezia formed a close alliance with Ippolito, as she had with all the Este brothers, a key factor in the dangerous situations which surrounded her. The first public sign of trouble came with the murder of the hitherto most trusted Borgia henchman, Francesco Troche. On the night of 8 June, Troche was strangled on a boat moored on the Tiber. According to Costabili’s account, Cesare interviewed the prisoner and then ‘His Excellency placing himself in a spot where he could see and not be seen, Troche was strangled by the hand of Don Michele . . .’ (Michelotto). It was all too reminiscent of the murder of Alfonso Bisceglie. Count Lodovico Pico della Mirandola, then one of Cesare’s captains, wrote in a letter to Francesco Gonzaga that Troche’s crime was to have revealed to the King of France the Borgias’ negotiations with Spain. As Troche was known to be pro-French he was now expendable and, with his intimate knowledge of Cesare’s affairs, positively dangerous.16 Cesare then compounded the effect of this act of terror by executing at dawn on the same day a leading Roman nobleman, Jacopo di Santa Croce, whose body was exposed on the bridge of Sant’Angelo. No explanation for the execution was given, but since he had been arrested with Cardinal Orsini and the others at the time of Sinigallia and confined with them to the Castel Sant’ Angelo the probable reason was that Cesare suspected him of conspiring with the Orsini against him.
For Lucrezia, knowing Cesare as she did, and well informed through the Este envoys at every court, the future seemed perilous. The Borgias, father and son, had been raising huge sums for the coming campaign. In secret consistory on 29 March, Alexander had created eighty new official posts to be sold to candidates at 760 ducats apiece. Cesare himself had set the rates for the new cardinals’ nomination. Driven on by the fear of being caught in the coming clash between France and Spain, the Borgias resorted to poisoning wealthy victims, a means which was, as Guicciardini admitted, an Italian rather than a Spanish custom. For this reason Italians were wont to attribute the deaths of prominent people to poison whereas they were usually down to some virulent fever caused by food poisoning; the number of cardinals who died during Alexander’s papacy did not proportionately exceed the average number of deaths under previous pontificates. Cesare’s normal method of disposing with enemies was the Spanish garrotte, or swift strangulation. The method now used was probably cantarella, white arsenic, and one case – the death on 10 April of Cardinal Giovanni Michiel, Bishop of Porto and Patriarch of Constantinople – was almost certainly the result of deliberate poisoning. As soon as Alexander heard of his death, Giustinian reported, he had Michiel’s house plundered. ‘The death of this Cardinal gives him more than 150,000 ducats.’ In early July, Alexander issued a Bull conferring the vicariate of Vitellozzo Vitelli’s Città di Castello on Cesare and requested the Perugians to offer him their lordship in place of the Baglioni. Negotiations with the always impecunious Emperor Maximilian for the investiture for Cesare of Lucca, Pisa and Siena were well under way. Everyone north of Rome expected some lightning move by Cesare but as July wore into August, il Valentino had still not made a move. In reality, the ‘son of Fortune’ was in an agony of suspense. In Gaeta the French, under Cesare’s old companion-in-arms Yves d’Alègre, still held out against the Spaniards while in Lombardy a large French force was massing to march south to the rescue.
By mid July, as Cesare waited in Rome, the romance between Bembo and Lucrezia became ever more intense, on the poet’s side at least. He was in Ferrara, as ardent as ever and, it would appear, led on by Lucrezia:
I rejoice that each day to increase my fire you cunningly devise some fresh incitement, such as that which encircled your glowing brow today [presumably a jewelled head ornament perhaps representing flames]. If you do such things because, feeling some little warmth yourself, you wish to see another burn, I shall not deny that for each spark of yours untold Etnas [Bembo’s first printed work was entitled De Aetna] are raging in my breast. And if you do so because it is natural for you to relish another’s suffering, who in all justice could blame me if he but knew the reasons for my ardour? Truly I can do no sin if I put my faith in such a gospel and in so many miracles. Let Love wreak just revenge for me, if upon your brow you are not the same as in your heart.17
Four days later, on the verge of leaving Ferrara, he was still burning with passion: ‘I am leaving, oh my dearest life, and yet I do not leave and never shall . . . If likewise you who stay were not to stay, I dare not speak for you, but truly “Ah, of all who love none more blest than I!” . . . All this long night, whether in dreams or laying awake, I was with you . . .’ He entreated her to read Gli Asolani which he was leaving with her and to discuss it with ‘my dear and saintly Lisabetta’. ‘My heart kisses Your Ladyship’s hand which so soon I shall come to kiss with these lips that are forever forming your name . . .’ After their parting, he could not resist one final note: ‘Not because I am able to tell you what tender bitterness enfolds me at this parting do I write to you, light of my life, but only to entreat you to cherish yourself most dearly . . .’18
After he left, Lucrezia, whom he had suspected was unwell when he left Ferrara, suffered two bouts of tertian fever but recovered sufficiently to charm Ariosto who was, Bembo told her, ‘deeply inflamed by Your Ladyship’s surpassing qualities, indeed all afire’. Apparently she had also praised his Gli Asolani both in a letter to him and to Ariosto: ‘Messer Lodovico [Ariosto] writes to me saying that he feels there is no need for it [Gli Asolani] to be brought out and read by all the world in order to gain glory, for more than it enjoys already could never come its way . . .’19 By early August he was back in Ferrara, very sick with fever and too ill to visit Lucrezia who bravely did him the signal honour of visiting his bedside and spending what he described as ‘a long while’ with him. ‘For the truth is your visit has altogether dispelled every trace of my grievous illness . . . and that vision alone and the merest pressure on my wrist had been enough to bring back all the health I had before. But to this you appended those dear sweet words so full of love and joy and the very quick of sympathy.’20
Even as Pietro Bembo wrote this, Lucrezia was about to face the most dangerous crisis of her life. On 11 August, her father had celebrated the eleventh anniversary of his elevation to the papacy but observers noted that he was far from in his usual spirits. He had been greatly depressed by the death on 1 August from fever (probably malaria) of his nephew Cardinal Juan Borgia-Lanzuol, Archbishop of Monreale (known as Juan Borgia ‘the elder’ to distinguish him from his younger brother of the same name). The cardinal had been excessively corpulent and as his funeral procession passed below the windows of the Vatican, Alexander, thinking of his own heavy body, had remarked, ‘This month is fatal for fat men.’ August was indeed a dangerous month to be in Rome – three of Alexander’s predescessors, Calixtus, Pius II and Sixtus IV, had died in the month of August and Innocent VIII at the end of July – and the August of 1503 was exceptionally hot. Alexander had remained in Rome because of the difficulties of the political situation, with Gaeta still holding out and a huge French force nearing Rome. Normally the papal court would have left the city for the cool of the Alban hills and to escape the threat of malaria perniciosa borne by the mosquitoes bred in the swamps of the Roman Campagna and the Tiber itself. The sickness struck without warning, accompanied by vomiting and bouts of fever which could raise a man’s temperature in a few hours to over 106 degrees Fahrenheit. On Saturday 12 August, Alexander was seized with a fit of vomiting and fever; Cesare, who had been planning to leave Rome on the 9th to try to come to terms with the French, fell ill the same day with the same symptoms.
The envoys circled the Vatican trying with little success to pick up scraps of information. It was two days before Costabili could even inform Ercole of the Pope’s serious illness – it was only on the 13th that he learned what had happened the previous day. The doors of the Palace were shut and no one was allowed out. ‘All this court is in considerable fear as to the illness of His Holiness and much is said,’ he reported. ‘All the same I try every way to find out the truth: but the more I investigate, the more I am told that it is not possible to understand anything for certain because the doctors, pharmacists and surgeons are not allowed out. But there is great suspicion that the illness is grave. The Illustrious Duke of Romagna is still, I understand from a good source, dangerously ill with“due tertiane” and “vomiting”.’21 Two days later he could report only that the Pope seemed better and Cesare worse; the Spaniards had retreated from Gaeta and Cesare’s troops were near Perugia, but there was no news of the French. On 18 August, at the hour of vespers, Alexander died. Writing to Ercole that evening Costabili was still unaware of it, noting only that the Palace was locked and more heavily guarded than usual. Lucrezia was better informed: her favourite, Cardinal Cosenza, and her ‘Magiordomo’ (possibly the Sancho Spagnolo frequently mentioned as being in her service) were both in the Vatican and knew the truth. Not only had she lost her beloved father but, unless Cesare, gravely ill, could somehow extricate himself from the dangerous situation, the Borgia era would be over, with all the implications that that might have for her own future.
On 21 August, Bembo found Lucrezia prostrate with grief at the Este villa of Medelana, not far from Ostellato, where she had gone with her household to escape the plague then raging through Ferrara. He had gone there to offer her consolation but ‘. . . as soon as I saw you lying there in that darkened room and in that black gown, so tearful and disconsolate, my feelings overwhelmed me and for a long time I stood there unable to utter a word, not knowing even what to say . . . my spirit in turmoil at the pity of that spectacle, tongue-tied and stammering I withdrew, as you saw, or might have seen . . .’
Wisely he counselled her to compose herself and demonstrate the self-control that people had come to expect of her:
I know not what else to say but to ask you to recall that Time soothes and lessens all our tribulations, and it would more become you, from whom all expect a most rare self-possession in view of the daily proofs you have given of your valour on every occasion and at every misadventure, not to delay such a time but rather to prepare for it resolutely. Furthermore, although you have now lost your very great father . . . this is not the first blow which you have suffered at the hands of your cruel and malevolent destiny. Indeed your spirit ought by now to be inured to shocks of fate, so many and so bitter have you already suffered.
‘And what is more,’ he added, ‘you would do well not to allow anyone to assume, as some might be led to infer in present circumstances, that you bewail not so much your loss but what may betide your present fortunes . . .’22
Lucrezia was isolated, well aware that apart from the Borgia partisans no one would mourn her father’s passing or her brother’s ill fortune, and that the latter group would certainly include her husband’s family. Ercole’s letter to Giangiorgio Seregni, his envoy in Milan (then under French control), made it plain what he felt: ‘Knowing that many will ask you how we are affected by the Pope’s death, this is to inform you that it was in no way displeasing to us’, adding with singular ingratitude:
there never was a Pope from whom we received fewer favours than this one . . . It was only with the greatest difficulty that we secured from him what he had promised, but beyond this he never did anything for us. For this we hold the Duke of Romagna responsible; for although he could not do with us as he wished, he treated us as if we were perfect strangers. He was never frank with us; he never confided his plans to us, although we always informed him of ours. Finally, as he inclined to Spain, and we remained good Frenchmen, we had little to look for either from the Pope or His Excellency. Therefore his death caused us little grief, as we had nothing to expect from the above-named duke . . .
Seregni was to show this letter to Chaumont (the French Governor of Milan) as evidence of Ercole’s true feelings but otherwise to speak cautiously on the subject and return the letter via Gian Luca Pozzi. Ercole was still uncertain which way to jump in case Cesare might regain or increase his power. He was telling Louis, however, what the French King wanted to hear.23 He did not visit Lucrezia although he was at Belriguardo, not far from Medelana.
Early in September, Bartolommeo de’Cavalleri, Ercole’s envoy with Louis in Macon, reported the French King’s significant reaction: ‘His Most Christian Majesty asked me if I had news of any reaction Madonna Lucretia had shown on the death of her father. I replied no and then he added, “I well know that you were never content with this marriage.” I answered that that was true and that if His Most Christian Majesty had attended to what he promised me not to write to Your Excellency to make the said marriage, it would not have been made. He answered that everything has been for the best, saying that Madonna Lucretia was not the true wife of Don Alfonso . . . ’24
Lucrezia’s situation was indeed precarious. As di Prosperi wrote significantly to Isabella: ‘I understand that the Lady is very upset and in truth it affects her in various respects, as Your Ladyship may imagine . . .’25 The Pope, the source of any power and influence she might have, was now dead. Her brother was gravely ill and could not help her and, although as lord of the Romagna he was still a factor in the Este considerations, no one could predict what his position might be on the election of a new pope. And as far as her own position as Alfonso’s wife was concerned, the reasons of state which had pushed the Duke of Ferrara into making this marriage no longer existed and the King of France had turned against Cesare. Moreover, everyone knew that her divorce from Giovanni Sforza on the grounds of non-consummation was a farce and it could have been argued that, as Louis had said, her marriage to Alfonso had no legal basis. Worst of all from her point of view was her failure to bear the Este a male heir. For the time being, uncertainty as to Cesare’s future helped her but, in the end, the fact that the Este made no attempt to dissolve the marriage is a tribute to her own character and the position she had managed to establish for herself in Ferrara. The Este – with the notable exception of Isabella – liked and appreciated her. There is no indication that they ever considered getting rid of her; had they done so they would have had to give back her vast dowry but whether this was a factor or not, the subject was never raised. According to di Prosperi, the Este did not desert her in her time of trouble: Ippolito had ridden out to Medelana to give Lucrezia the news of her father’s death and, even if Ercole did not visit her immediately, Alfonso did before going on to Belriguardo, no doubt to consult with his father.
Lucrezia may or may not have known the sad and revolting details of her father’s death and burial. Rumours of poison were rife; some even held that the Borgias had poisoned each other by mistake at the dinner held on 5 August by their friend Adriano da Corneto, recently created cardinal. Cesare and Alexander, the story ran, had intended to poison their host and seize his possessions, but there was a mix-up over the jugs of wine and they too drank the poison intended for their victim. It is an indication of the extraordinary atmosphere surrounding the Borgias that this farcical scenario was widely believed. Francesco Gonzaga, at the French headquarters at Isola Farnese outside Rome, sent Isabella an account of Alexander’s death which included a Faustian pact with the devil:
When he [Alexander] fell sick, he began to talk in such a way that anyone who did not know what was in his mind would have thought that he was wandering, although he was perfectly conscious of what he said; his words were, ‘I come; it is right; wait a moment.’ Those who know the secret say that in the conclave following the death of Innocent he made a compact with the devil, and purchased the papacy from him at the price of his soul. Among the other provisions of the agreement was one which said that he should be allowed to occupy the Holy See twelve years [actually eleven], and this he did with the addition of four days. There are some who affirm that at the moment he gave up his spirit seven devils were seen in his chamber. As soon as he was dead his body began to putrefy and his mouth to foam . . . The body swelled up so that it lost all human form. It was nearly as broad as it was long. It was carried to the grave with little ceremony; a porter dragged it from the bed by means of a cord fastened to the foot to the place where it was buried, as all refused to touch it. It was given a wretched interment, in comparison with which that of the cripple’s dwarf wife in Mantua was ceremonious. Scandalous epigrams are every day published concerning him.26
That a sophisticated aristocrat like the Marquis of Mantua should believe such stuff about pacts with the devil is an indication of how close medieval superstition lay to the surface of the supposedly humanist, classical Renaissance. The gruesome facts of the burial were to some extent, however, confirmed by Burchard who was in charge of organizing it. As soon as Cesare, lying weak but conscious in the room above the Pope’s, was made aware of his father’s death he sent Michelotto and a squad of armed men to secure the Pope’s apartments and remove silver, jewels and cash to the value of 300,000 ducats (in their haste they missed another cache of valuables but what they managed to find was enough to finance Cesare’s immediate future). The papal servants then plundered the apartments and wardrobes leaving only the papal thrones, some cushions and hangings. At four o’clock in the afternoon, they opened the doors and announced that the Pope was dead. Burchard, arriving to supervise the laying out of the body, found the Vatican more or less deserted and not a cardinal in sight. He had Alexander’s body clothed in red brocade vestments and covered with a fine tapestry, laid on a table in the Sala del Pappagallo, scene of so many Borgia festivities. Two tapers burned beside it but no one kept vigil. The next day it was borne on a bier by the customary group of paupers to St Peter’s where fighting broke out as the guards tried to seize the valuable wax tapers from the monks accompanying the body. In the confusion the Pope’s body was abandoned. Burchard and a few others dragged the bier behind the railings of the high altar and locked the grille for fear that Alexander’s enemies might try to desecrate his body.
During the next day, as Gonzaga described, the body began to decompose in the great heat. Burchard found a horrific sight: ‘Its face had changed to the colour of mulberry or the blackest cloth, and it was covered in blue-black spots. The nose was swollen, the mouth distended where the tongue was doubled over and the lips seemed to fill everything. The appearance of the face then was more horrifying than anything that had ever been seen or reported before . . .’ At the burial it was found that the coffin was too short and too narrow; six porters making blasphemous jokes about the late Pope and his hideous appearance ‘rolled up his body in an old carpet and pummelled and pushed it into the coffin with their fists. No wax tapers or lights were used and no priests or any other persons attended his body.’
Hundreds of miles to the north, Lucrezia, as Bembo had pointed out, could not afford to be seen destroyed by grief for long. As a Borgia, she was resilient and she saw that she had to act quickly to salvage what remained of Borgia power: that meant Cesare. Despite his weakness, Cesare played his cards with his usual skill and deception. He was still the major Italian force in terms of money and troops, a factor which could decide the balance between France and Spain. Most of his lands in the Romagna still held firm for him. Equally importantly, both the French and the Spanish believed that Cesare, with the numbers of cardinals at his command, could swing the result of the election of the next pope, critical in the circumstances. And, whatever Ercole d’Este might have privately felt, he was sincerely apprehensive as to what his old enemy, Venice, might do should Cesare’s power in the Romagna crumble. Cesare at first feigned to make an agreement with Prospero Colonna and the Spanish side, then double-crossed them by making an agreement with the French, and took the road to Nepi. On 5 September the French dispatched letters in his favour to the Romagna to the effect that the Duke Valentino was ‘alive, well and the friend of the King of France’. This had the effect of stemming the tide running against him in the Romagna where Guidobaldo had returned to Urbino, Gian Paolo Baglioni to Perugia and the surviving Vitelli to Città di Castello. Venice had occupied Porto Cesenatico on 1 September, sent Giovanni Sforza back to Pesaro on the 3rd, and Pandolfo Malatesta to Rimini on the 6th. Attempts against Cesena, Imola and Faenza failed, the Venetians drew back and the cautious Ercole wrote to Cesare offering his congratulations on his recovery and his wisdom in turning to the French.
Lucrezia acted resolutely to help her brother: Sanudo reported on 27 September that she was raising troops in Ferrara and paying 20 ducats each to twenty bombardiers .27 On October he wrote that she had sent fifty cavalry to help Cesare at Faenza and Forli, and on the 20th that Cesare’s captain at the Rocca di Forli had left Ferrara with a force including 150 Germans, the greater part of them sent by the Duke of Ferrara in Lucrezia’s name, and gone to Cesena.
Cesare, however, was not the only Borgia Lucrezia had to be concerned about. In the dangerous times following Alexander’s death, the two little Borgia children, Rodrigo Bisceglie and Giovanni Borgia, were sent for safety to the Castel Sant’Angelo, to be followed later by Cesare’s illegitimate children, Girolamo and Camilla. Alexander’s last child, named Rodrigo, born of an unknown mother in the last year of his papacy, is not mentioned, possibly because he was young enough to be left with his mother. On 2 September when Cesare left for Nepi he took with him Vannozza, the Borgia children and Jofre who had shown considerable courage after Alexander’s death. Sancia who, for some unexplained reason had been in the Castel Sant’Angelo since October 1502, was released and departed for Naples with Prospero Colonna, whose mistress she soon became. On 3 October, Cesare returned to Rome with his family, determined to confront his enemies and to exert his influence over the recently elected pope, the old and ailing Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini, now Pius III. Cardinal Cosenza and Ippolito d’Este had been appointed guardians of the two elder boys; at this juncture Cosenza apparently wrote Lucrezia a letter, which has not survived, suggesting that Rodrigo should be sent to Spain for his own safety, the implication being that while Giovanni and the other little Borgias might be acceptable to the Este, poor Rodrigo, whom Lucrezia had not seen for well over a year, would not be. In an anguished letter which has hitherto not been published, Lucrezia, often accused of being a thoughtless mother where Rodrigo was concerned, appealed to Ercole for his opinion, enclosing Cosenza’s letter. To send him so far away seemed to her very hard to bear as a mother:
Knowing it to be my duty to communicate to you as my father and only benefactor all my affairs and particularly of such importance to me as the interests of don roderico my son, I am writing this to you now.
It is the opinion of the Most Reverend Cardinal of Cosenza for reasons which Your Lordship will understand from his enclosed letter that Don Roderico [Rodrigo] be transferred to Valencia. As to which although it seems to me so far away as to be most hard for a mother [to bear] however I will accede to your most wise counsel, given the fact that the death of His late Holiness Our Lord happened so suddenly that he [Rodrigo] could not establish an appropriate state and that little which he did have will be taken from him, for this I pray Your Excellency that not only will you consult me as to your opinion but hold him recommended in everything you know might preserve and profit him: which will be among the other obligations I have to you of eternal benefit. . .28
Ercole replied, in an affectionate, thoughtful, almost fatherly letter, that he considered the cardinal’s advice sound, and that Lucrezia owed Cosenza a debt of gratitude
for the demonstration and proof of so much cordial love that he clearly bears to you and to the most illustrious Don Roderico your son, who, one can say, has been preserved in life by his means. And although Don Roderico will be somewhat severed from Your Ladyship, it is better to be so far away and safe, than near with the danger in which he evidently would be; nor, because of this distance, will the love between you be at all diminished. When he has grown up, he will be able according to the condition of the times to decide on his own course, whether to return to Italy or to stay.
He thought the cardinal’s suggestion that Rodrigo’s Italian property should be sold to provide for his support a wise one (since, following the death of Alexander, the dukedom of Nepi would be taken away from him, leaving him only with his father’s estates in the Kingdom of Naples). ‘Nevertheless,’ Ercole ended, ‘if to your Ladyship, who is most prudent, it should seem otherwise, we yield to your better judgement.’29
Lucrezia’s maternal feelings led her to reject the advice of both Ercole and Cosenza. She could not bring herself to send her firstborn – and at that time only – child to Spain. A compromise was reached whereby Rodrigo was to be brought up by his father’s relations, first in Naples, probably by Sancia, his aunt, and then after her death in c. 1506 by his father’s half-sister, Isabella d’Aragona Sforza, Duchess of Bari, the legitimate daughter of Alfonso II. He would keep his Neapolitan estates. This last decision may possibly have been prompted by a solemn promise made by the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, on 20 May 1502 confirming Cesare, Jofre, Juan Gandia’s son (also named Juan), in the possession of all their Neapolitan estates, an impressive document which Lucrezia had taken care to bring with her from Rome since it still exists among her papers in the archives at Modena.30 Although apparently not allowed to have Rodrigo with her at Ferrara, Lucrezia continued to care for his welfare and there are many entries in her wardrobe accounts for clothes for ‘Don Rodrigo’. Lucrezia’s baby half-brother, also called Rodrigo and born in the last year of her father’s life, was apparently brought up in Naples, while Giovanni Borgia and Cesare’s two illegitimate children were brought to Carpi, not far from Ferrara.
Just at this time Lucrezia and Pietro Bembo had a quarrel in the course of which she seems to have accused him of wavering in his devotion to her and leaving her to go to Venice. Bembo’s affair with Lucrezia was described by his biographer as ‘the most ambitious and memorable, but also the most risky and anguished’ of his life. It seems probable that his father, well acquainted with the situation in Ferrara, had put pressure on him to return to Venice for his own sake and indeed planned (unsuccessfully) to get him out of the way by obtaining a post for him with an embassy to France. Poor Bembo was anguished. On 5 October he wrote:
Firstly. . . I would rather not have come by some great treasure than hear what I heard from you yesterday. . . although – as our sworn affinity deserved – you might well have let me know it earlier. And secondly, that as long as there is life in me my cruel fate will never prevent the fire in which f.f. and my destiny have placed me from being the highest and brightest blaze that in our time ever set a lover’s heart alight. It will soar by virtue of the place where it burns, bright with the intensity of its own flame, and one day it will be a beacon to all the world.
She had completely misjudged him, he told her.
Now think me false as much as you will, believe the truth as little as you please, but like it or not, the day shall come when you must acknowledge how far you judged me wrong. There are times I fear this is not so much how others would have you believe, it is your very own opinion. And if this be so, then I hope that the motto I read among your papers a few days ago will prove to be true: quien quiere matar perro ravia le levanta (he who would kill a dog must work himself up a rage). Make a merry blaze of all my other letters. . . and this alone I beg you to deign to keep as pledge for what I write . . .31
During the time Lucrezia had been at Medelana and Bembo at Ostellato, the two had enjoyed romantic meetings, as he recalled in a letter from Venice on 18 October. In the eight days since he had parted from Lucrezia not one hour had passed without his thinking of her: ‘Often I find myself recalling. . . certain words spoken to me, some on the balcony with the moon as witness, others at that window I shall always look upon so gladly . . .32 But Lucrezia had been right in her diagnosis of her lover’s waning ardour, or more probably his increased concern for his own safety. Bembo’s surviving subsequent letters for that year are no less ardent but full of excuses for not seeing her. On 25 October he wrote to ‘f.f.’ from his father’s villa at Noniano that he had to go to Venice for two days, after which, as he had promised her, he would return:
to see once more my own dear half without whom I am not merely incomplete but nothing at all, she being not simply one half of me but everything I am and can ever hope to be. And there could be no sweeter fate for me on earth nor could I win anything more precious than to lose myself like this, living the rest of my life in one thought alone, which, if in two hearts one and the same purpose thrives, and one single fire, may endure as long as those hearts wish, no matter what the heavens conspire. And this they can all the more readily accomplish because strangers’ eyes are unable to discern their thoughts and no human power can bar the road they take since they come and go unseen . . . 33
But Bembo was being overoptimistic: the heavens were indeed about to conspire against the lovers. In November 1503 Bembo had taken refuge in Ferrara with Strozzi even though Lucrezia was still in Medelana ‘because at Ostellato, as I told you, there are no provisions on account of the visit of His Lordship Don Alfonso’s court . . .’, a feeble excuse which suggests that Bembo was unwilling to incur Alfonso’s anger by being seen in Lucrezia’s vicinity. Although Lucrezia was in Ferrara from at least mid December, there was time for only one last meeting before Bembo was called back to Venice to find that his brother Carlo had died on 30 December. The need to comfort his elderly father and, one might well speculate, the instinct that he was not welcome in Ferrara once Lucrezia’s husband had returned, led him to decide to stay in Venice and send for his books, which indicated that his stay would be a long one. He would always, he assured her in words that have an almost valedictory ring, ‘be that faithful Heliotrope to whom you alone and for ever remain the sun’.34