‘The more I try to please God, the more he tries me . . .’
– Lucrezia’s anguished cry on hearing of the violent death of Cesare in Navarre in March 1507
The new year of 1507 began as the old year had ended, with present-giving, balls and festivities. Lucrezia sent Isabella boxes of salted fish and oysters from the lagoons – valli – of Comacchio, while Isabella ordered for herself pounds of sweetmeats and the Ferrarese speciality, sugared cedri(large lemon-type citrus fruit), from Lucrezia’s celebrated confectioner Vincenzo Morello da Napoli, known as ‘Vincentio spetiale’. Lucrezia gave balls for the French commander de Lapalisse at which the torch dance (‘il ballo de la torce’) was performed.
Lucrezia was pregnant again, as di Prosperi learned on 3 January, from il Barone, who in turn had had confirmation from one of Lucrezia’s priests. Despite her history of miscarriages and difficult pregnancies, she threw herself into the carnival celebrations. Francesco Gonzaga arrived on the 9th with two pleasure-loving young cardinals, his brother, Sigismondo Gonzaga, and Alfonso’s cousin, Luigi d’Aragona, and immediately visited Lucrezia, accompanied by Alfonso. The Sala Grande was decorated with tapestries and silks in preparation for the carnival balls. Lucrezia’s enthusiasm proved fatal to her pregnancy: in mid January she miscarried again. Alfonso was furious and despondent, the more so because he blamed Lucrezia for bringing it on herself: ‘it is attributed to various causes,’ di Prosperi reported, ‘to remaining on her feet for long hours, going about in carriages, and perhaps some jaunts abroad in masks – also by climbing some steep stairs which she has had made in the camerini above the stuffeta longa, which she has turned into two camerini with two more above them.’ The foetus was so undeveloped that it could not be discerned whether it was male or female – possibly six weeks old, di Prosperi guessed. Lucrezia too was very upset by ‘this disaster of hers’, as di Prosperi put it: at her failure at her third attempt to provide an Este heir, and perhaps by the knowledge that her own overexuberance in the presence of Gonzaga had been responsible for it. Adding to her pain was the fact that Isabella was pregnant and nearing her proper term; she successfully gave birth to a third son shortly afterwards, which she, perhaps defiantly, named Ferrante. The concealed rivalry between the two women continued.
With her usual resilience, however, Lucrezia quickly recovered her spirits, although she kept to her rooms. By early February she was well enough to go out and take part in the masking in the streets, and in the evening there was dancing, singing and concerts in her apartments, attended by Luigi d’Aragona and other worldly cardinals including Cardinal Giovanni de’Medici, the future Pope Leo X. She went out richly dressed in a carriage to a supper at the house of Antonio Costabili and herself gave a dinner, with dancing in her principal chamber. The cardinals, having escaped from the less amusing court of Julius II, enjoyed themselves every night until dawn until the end of carnival. By the end of February, di Prosperi wrote that the masques and dancing had been put aside and ‘now we all attend the sermons of Fra Raphaele of Varese’, whom Lucrezia had invited specially to Ferrara. Despite her lighthearted enjoyment of conversation, dancing and singing, Lucrezia had a strong streak of genuine piety in her nature and took her religion seriously. She enthusiastically followed Fra Raphaele’s sumptuary prohibitions but when orders were issued to ‘moderate the pomp of ladies’ – forbidding the wearing of rich materials and cosmetics (women used a white paste as a foundation on which they dabbed a rouge made of maiolica) – most people thought that she was going too far and that they should be allowed to practise as they wished. Deepdécolletées were also proscribed. The ladies of Ferrara rebelled and Lucrezia and her preacher were forced to back down.
While Lucrezia and her friar were attempting to tame the ladies of Ferrara, Cesare Borgia was embarking on his last campaign, fighting for his brother-in-law, the King of Navarre, against a rebel count. At dawn on 12 March 1507 he was killed in an ambush outside the small town of Viana in Navarre; stripped of its armour, his naked body was left bleeding on the ground. Cesare was thirty years old; he had survived the lifespan, twenty-eight, he had set himself by just two years, dying three days short of the Ides of March which had been fatal to his hero, Julius Caesar.
Lucrezia remained unaware of what had happened for some six weeks after his death. Cesare’s faithful squire Juan Grasica arrived in Ferrara with the news on 22 April. He went first to Ippolito who, knowing that, as one of Isabella’s correspondents put it, Lucrezia ‘loved her brother as much as if she were his mother’, could not bring himself to tell her and deputed Fra Raphaele to do so. For Lucrezia, Cesare’s death was the supreme sorrow of a life already full of tragedies. She apparently responded with an anguished cry: ‘The more I try to please God, the more he tries me . . .’, and shut herself away, ‘torturing herself day and night’ with grief, calling out his name, unable to conceal her pain. Di Prosperi opined that few people would dare condole with her ‘because of her reserved nature’. In public, just as she had when Alexander died, she kept her self-control, as Sanudo reported on 22 April: ‘. . . the death of Duke Valentino was notified to his sister, madama Lucretia by Fra Raphael who preached there this lent; she showed great grief, nevertheless with a great constancy and without tears’.1 Fortitude was a much admired quality in the Renaissance, as it had been during classical times. Alfonso was proud of her and grateful for Ippolito’s tactful handling of the matter: ‘We are beyond measure satisfied with what your most reverend Lordship has intimated to us, touching the notification of the fate of the Duke her brother to our most illustrious consort,’ he wrote to Ippolito on 27 April from the camp at Genoa, ‘it seeming to us that Your Lordship in this matter has proceeded according to your natural prudence and experience. Likewise we are much pleased that Her Ladyship, our consort, has borne this calamity so patiently as Your Lordship tells us . . .’2
It was not until the end of the month that she could bring herself to leave her bed and to receive the condolences of her own household; few others were admitted. Agapito da Amelia, the distinguished humanist who had long served as Cesare’s confidential principal secretary, arrived from Bologna where he was now secretary to the papal legate, and remained many hours with her talking over the past. Beyond Angela Borgia, with whom she had dined during carnival in Ferrara and who returned from Sassuolo to comfort her, there was no one with whom she could truly share her grief; and, indeed, outside the remaining Borgia circle, no one mourned the death of the terrible Valentino. Alfonso, who was away helping Louis XII crush the rebellion at Genoa, tried to comfort her by writing that Cesare was ‘victorious against the enemies of his brother-in-law’ when he was killed.
Lucrezia’s circle of poets now sprang into action: Ercole Strozzi wrote an epicedium on Cesare’s death which he dedicated to ‘the divine Lucretia Borgia’, describing Cesare as ‘The chief pride of thy race . . . thy brother, mighty in peace, mighty in war, whose arduous glory is equal both in deed and in name to the great Caesars . . .’ ‘And now all dare give rein to so great a sorrow,’ he added with pardonable exaggeration. Geronimo Casio of Bologna, who had known Cesare, wrote equally histrionically, ‘Cesare Borgia, whom all for force of arms and valour regarded as a sun, dying, went where sets the sun Phoebus, towards the evening, to the West.’ Machiavelli saw Cesare’s life in Renaissance terms, as an example of the extreme malignity of fortune, as he wrote in Chapter VII of The Prince, of which Cesare was the hero: ‘So summing up all that the Duke did, I cannot possibly censure him. Rather, I think I have been right in putting him forward as an example for all those who have acquired power through good fortune and the arms of others. He was a man of high courage and ambition, and he could not have conducted himself other than the way he did; his plans were frustrated only because Alexander’s life was cut short and because of his own sickness . . . If when Alexander died, he had been well himself, everything would have been easy for him.’
But Cesare’s enemies mocked him and his famous motto ‘Either Caesar or nothing’. In Mantua Isabella d’Este gleefully recalled Sister Osanna’s prophecy that Cesare’s dominion would be ‘as a straw fire’. Some remembered him with sympathy: ‘In war he was a brave man and a good companion’, a French captain said of him. He has gone down in history as a monster which, to a certain extent, he was. He was a creature of darkness and light, ruthless, amoral, charming and brilliant. His soldiers loved him and those close to him remained loyal to the end. He was popular in his lands of the Romagna where he had begun to lay down a new administration of justice. History has not been kind to him: he made too many enemies and in the end he failed; but the single-minded drive and ability with which he pursued what he saw as his high destiny had the qualities of genius.
Lucrezia had loved her brother passionately: whether their relations had ever been incestuous or not, he was part of her and no man could ever replace him. In her anguish she turned for solace to the other two men in her life: her husband, Alfonso, and her lover, Francesco Gonzaga. Bembo, probably aware by the autumn of 1505, when he had last written to her, of her relationship with Gonzaga and of Alfonso’s hostility, had removed himself to the court of Urbino. Lucrezia’s dealings with men were as deft as the neat steps with which she executed the complicated choreography of the torch dance. She managed to keep the affection and respect of her husband while retaining the lifelong love of Gonzaga under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances, seemingly occupying a special place in the hearts of two men who were not generally known for their respect for women.
Bravely, Lucrezia had managed to bring herself to write almost daily to Alfonso, saying how pleased she was by his favourable reception by Louis at the camp before Genoa and that he was in good health and spirits. She received Gian Luca Pozzi, who gave her a long account of the events at Genoa, but it was not until 30 April that she received Alfonso’s handwritten letter of the 27th about Cesare (which has not survived). In her grief she felt the need of his reassuring presence: ‘I pray God continually for the preservation and good health of Your Lordship and that matters at Genoa are quickly and happily expedited so that Your Lordship can return home with a swiftness which I desire with all my heart.’ In Alfonso’s absence, she also had the presence of mind to correspond with Ippolito about the movements of the Bentivoglio, whom the Pope suspected of trying to recapture Bologna, and about the information she had received from the papal legate there and about his request that she should send a commissioner into the Modenese with orders not to facilitate their passage nor to provide them with supplies.3 She wrote to no one else for several months in the period after Cesare’s death – not even to Gonzaga – or if she did the letters have not survived. After the surrender of Genoa to the French King, Alfonso returned on 9 May but, although he visited her first, he did not spend long with her and went on to confer at length with Ippolito.
From the time of Cesare’s death rumours that Lucrezia was pregnant were repeated and denied throughout the summer with increasing insistence by di Prosperi. On 18 May she was reposing in bed for most of the time ‘to preserve her pregnancy’ but by 2 August, when Alfonso left for Venice and Comacchio, she was in charge again: ‘The Lady is Governor in the usual way which has clarified the fact that she is not pregnant,’ he reported. Later in August, Lucrezia went to Modena while Alfonso busied himself with his artillery foundry in Ferrara and dined frequently with Ippolito. By 16 September, in a letter reporting the marriage of Ercole Strozzi to Barbara Torelli and the return to Ferrara of Angela Borgia and her husband to spend some months there, the inquisitive di Prosperi had found the Comatre Frassina in the Corte and asked her if the Duchess were indeed pregnant: ‘It seems that there is some hope that she is.’ This time it appears that the rumours were true: on 7 November the Comatre Frassina confirmed the pregnancy and that in four months a child would be born.
But in the summer of 1507, as she looked for consolation for the loss of her adored brother, Lucrezia’s relationship with Gonzaga had become ever more passionate – and secret. Ercole Strozzi had again taken up the dangerous role of facilitator of romance between Lucrezia and her admirers, which he had played so effectively during her relationship with Pietro Bembo, and was now involved in her correspondence with Gonzaga. Gonzaga was an old friend and patron, Alfonso a man who both disliked him and had deprived him of his lucrative office. And Strozzi had a tenderness for Lucrezia, probably exaggerated by his biographer, Wirtz, into love. Under the pseudonym ‘Zilio’ (lily), Strozzi carried on a correspondence between ‘Guido’, the name of one of his brothers but actually referring to Francesco Gonzaga, and ‘Madonna Barbara’, who was not Barbara Torelli, the object of his affections, but Lucrezia herself. In a letter to Gonzaga dated 23 September 1507 announcing his own marriage to Barbara Torelli, Strozzi coyly referred to Torelli as ‘my Madonna Barbara’, sending greetings from himself and Lucrezia ‘your Madonna Barbara’.4 The master archivist of Mantua, Alessandro Luzio, however, found an earlier letter among the few surviving in the Gonzaga archives at Mantua, beginning in the summer of 1507: ‘I have not sent back that messenger because I have been trying everything to get an answer to M. Guido’s letter, if Madonna Barbara had not been suffering such mental travail [presumably a reference to Lucrezia’s continuing mourning for Cesare], it would have already been done because Zilio never stops soliciting for it . . .’5
The situation was complicated for Lucrezia by the undercurrents of hostility of which she was well aware between Francesco Gonzaga and Alfonso. That September of 1507 in the official correspondence with Gonzaga which she had resumed in the absence of Alfonso she had felt it necessary to stress that Alfonso’s letters and actions showed ‘his excellent disposition towards Your Lordship’.6
Knowing that she was pregnant, Lucrezia had made preparations for the carnival of the new year of 1508 to be particularly joyful. The Sala Grande was hung with the most splendid of the Este tapestries. Everyone focused on the pleasures of going about masked: Lucrezia, her ladies and courtiers watched from the great window of the Sala Grande. A ‘very gallant’ ball was held in the Sala Grande. There was tilting at the quintain (‘Quintana’), more feasts and more balls. Angela Borgia, who was rumoured to be pregnant, ‘found it necessary to dance’ but Lucrezia, wiser this time and without the stimulating presence of Francesco Gonzaga, did not. The carnival festivities went on unhindered despite the thunderings of a hellfire preacher. The young men of the court began practising for a great joust on the feast of St Matthew, and on 13 February an eclogue commissioned by Ippolito was performed in the Sala Grande where Alfonso and Ippolito, ‘both masked’, and Lucrezia with a good company of gentlewomen, sat on a tribune hung with tapestries. The eclogue was composed by Ercole Pio, brother of Emilia, one of the heroines of Castiglione’sThe Courtier, a dialogue of amorous shepherds praising the great ladies of Old Testament, Greek and Roman times and of three contemporary grandes dames, Lucrezia, Isabella d’Este and Elisabetta, Duchess of Urbino. This was followed by Ippolito’s Slav acrobats executing prodigious leaps, a girl tightrope walker and the cardinal’s lute players and singers singing the praises of the ‘diva Borgia’. Incense was thrown on a sacrificial fire and the whole thing ended in a dance. The eclogues, separately commissioned by Alfonso and Lucrezia (from Tebaldeo) and performed on 8 March, were generally considered inferior, but the first performance of Ariosto’s comedy, La Cassaria, ordered by Ippolito, was praised by di Prosperi as ‘as elegant and delightful as any other I have ever seen played’. Described by Gardner as ‘a rollicking piece of work’, it was greatly appreciated by the court, as were the music and the scenery painted by the Duke’s court painter, Pellegrino da San Daniele.7 The joint presentation of the eclogues and comedy by the three symbolized the new unity of the Este family after the upheavals of the Congiura, but in the bowels of the Torre dei Leoni, Ferrante and Giulio lived their lives in isolation and silence.
For the moment, however, the Este were determined to enjoy carnival. There were jousts, and Ippolito and a companion were seen going about disguised in Turkish costumes of gold brocade ornamented with applique flowers of black silk, estimated to cost 200 ducats each. It was hardly a disguise, di Prosperi commented, since the pair stood out among the others for the richness of their clothes. Ippolito reacted with his usual violence to the impertinence of his chamberlain, one Alfonso Cestatello, whom he had ordered not to take part in the last evening’s carnival celebration, for failing to provide some things necessary for the cardinal’s masking. Cestatello had replied impertinently and gone there all the same whereupon he was seized by the hair by Masino del Forno, confined to prison and afterwards exiled to Capua for six months.
It was noticed that Lucrezia had not taken part in the dancing during the last days of carnival; she was reported to be seven months gone and to have engaged a beautiful young wet nurse. Both she and Angela Borgia were nearing their term, and both had ordered sumptuous cradles and preparations for their lyingin. On 25 March, di Prosperi estimated the birth to be imminent; people were storing away books and documents from the Palazzo della Ragione and public offices for fear of their being burned in an outbreak of rowdy celebrations at the birth of an heir. By the 29th, Angela Borgia had already given birth to a son while Lucrezia’s delivery was daily awaited. Alfonso, who had had some misunderstanding with Venice, went there on 3 April with a fleet of boats to make his peace and he was there when, on 4 April, Lucrezia gave birth to a son, named Ercole in honour of his grandfather. The baby was fair-skinned, handsome and lively, with, according to di Prosperi, who saw him when he was three weeks old, ‘a most beautiful mouth but a little snub nose and eyes [which were] not very dark nor very large’.
On 27 April, di Prosperi went to visit Lucrezia in her camerini and found her reposing on her bed in conversation with Ippolito. ‘Her Ladyship is very well and from what I understand for these holy feast days she has gone to the loggia of the Chapel to hear divine service. I also saw her son who seemed to me even handsomer and more vivacious than before . . .’ He described Lucrezia’s apartments:
Yesterday I visited the Duchess’s rooms . . . the decoration of the apartment is as follows. In the Salotto there is only a great carpet over the table, with a bench and a backrest; in the large Antechamber the upholstery of the bed is of mulberry satin which belonged to your mother [the Duchess Eleonora], embroidered with bunches of everlasting flowers, with very fine hanging [tapestries] of silk and wool around this room from the ceiling to the floor, among them the scene of the Judgement of Solomon. In the Camera de la Stufa Grande, the back hangings are fashioned in pavilion style [tent shaped], attached to the gilded cornice which surrounds this room.
In the first Camerino the hangings ordered by the Duchess Eleonora include a pavilion with curtains of crimson satin with the arms of the Este. In the Duchess Lucrezia’s room, where she is now, there is a pavilion of cloth of silver with a deep fringe of gold thread, decorated with sheets of striped cambric . . . and round this Camerino are curtains of crimson mulberry velvet and cloth of gold, with the arms of the house of Este. In the Camera dorata next to these rooms the baby lies in a camp bed [de bachete], with a satin cover striped alla morescha in white, crimson and other colours; the room is hung round with satin cloth. Then there is the cradle placed in front of the bed in this room which is of such a splendour that I do not know how to describe it: it is made in a square six feet long and five feet wide with a mounting step covered with white cloth, and at each corner there is a square block in the antique fashion, above which rise four columns which sustain a most beautiful architrave with its cornice, and above the architrave is a carved garland which goes from corner to corner – all in gold without any colour, and it is hung with curtains of white satin, as is the canopy. In the centre of this square is a cradle . . . on a pedestal, all of it gilded. The cradle cover is of cloth of gold and its sheets of cambric and turnings of most beautiful embroidered linen.
In the outer rooms, Beatrice de’Contrari and the Comatre Frassina were in attendance, while il Barone sat on the floor with other court jesters.
Ercole Strozzi’s ostensible role in corresponding with Francesco Gonzaga was to compose differences between Alfonso and Ippolito on the one side and Francesco on the other, petty but continuing disputes to which di Prosperi also referred. An optimistic letter of 2 January 1508 from Strozzi to Gonzaga was counteracted by an angry letter of 14 January from Francesco complaining that fugitive servants of his had been welcomed at Ferrara and another on 13 March, asserting that his brothers-in-law, under the cover of amicable protestations, continued in their intent to find new cause for controversy.8 The efforts of Benedetto Brugi and Bernardino di Prosperi were equally optimistic and equally unavailing. According to Luzio, Alfonso’s feelings against Francesco were such that when he had left for Venice just before Lucrezia’s delivery of their son, he had ordered that Lucrezia was not to send news of the event to the Marquis of Mantua.
It was just before Alfonso’s prohibition concerning the communication of the birth that the first surviving letter of the ‘Zilio’ correspondence of this year began. Naturally, pseudonyms were used: Alfonso was ‘Camillo’ and Ippolito ‘Tigrino’ (‘little tiger’), an apt reference to his fierce nature. According to this letter, dated 23 March 1508, Francesco (‘Guido’) had obviously sent back the incriminating letters: Strozzi had handed Lucrezia her letter and burned the rest. Some of the letter is devoted to the cause of reconciliation between Gonzaga and the Este brothers; there had been a suggestion that Gonzaga should have come to Ferrara to effect it. From the text it is apparent that it was Lucrezia who made the running; Gonzaga hung back on the excuse that he was ill. Although he suffered from syphilis, this was a pretext which he frequently deployed to keep himself out of trouble and Lucrezia, it seems, saw through it: ‘She regrets that you have been unwell, all the more that that sickness has prevented you from writing and even more from coming here. If you come here it will be as dear to you as 25,000 ducats and more: I cannot express to you the anger that has taken her because she was [so] willing to see you and because you have never answered her, which has made her anxious to know the cause.’ Strozzi advised him to ‘dissimulate’ with Alfonso and Ippolito even if they had taken his servant (a page who had apparently fled Mantua and been received and protected in Ferrara by Ippolito).9 If Francesco did not do this, ‘they will seek every day to offend you in one way or another’. ‘Madonna Barbara’ had commissioned him to write on her behalf that he (Francesco) should follow Strozzi’s advice: ‘It cannot injure you and could profit you, and if it does not profit you in one way in another it will profit you with Madonna Barbara who I certify to you loves you: she is displeased by your lack of warmth but she is pleased that you are discreet, as well as many qualities she praises in you.’ Nonetheless he repeated Lucrezia’s surprise that Francesco had not written to her: ‘if you agree, as my brother-in-law is coming here, it would be good to write to her and if you wish it she can send the letters back to you’.
Ercole Strozzi repeated Lucrezia’s desire to see Francesco: ‘she says you should do everything so that she can see you’. The next letter had been written on the eve of Lucrezia’s giving birth to her son, a fact which greatly shocked Luzio, a committed partisan of Isabella. Gonzaga had sent a message to ‘Madonna Barbara’ that he had fever: she prayed him to let Strozzi know how he was and not to be so unfriendly. ‘Every day we talk of you,’ Strozzi wrote, ‘and urge you to do everything you can to reconcile yourself with Camillo because from every point of view it is better to make peace.’ Alfonso had gone to Venice the day before, he reported, although he did not mention ‘Camillo’s’ instructions to his wife not to send Gonzaga news of her delivery. Lucrezia conveyed this in a message asking Francesco to forgive her if she did not advise him of her delivery and to believe in her ‘goodwill’. 10 Accordingly, Bernardino di Prosperi was sent officially by Lucrezia to Mantua to announce the birth of Ercole to Isabella, but to Isabella only. Alfonso wrote to Gonzaga from Venice to make the formal announcement the next day. Even di Prosperi thought it more than odd that he had not been commissioned to take a letter to Francesco: ‘From what I hear everyone is sorry that I was not given a similar letter to the Most Illustrious Marchese . . .’
Lucrezia, reckless and passionate, dictated a letter on 9 April to Strozzi for transmission to ‘Guido’, complaining that both Alfonso and Ippolito had indicated that they did not wish her to announce the birth to him. She denounced them almost hysterically and wanted Francesco to let it be known that he was surprised at the omission so that she could officially send someone to him. She wanted to send Strozzi, who, according to his letter to Gonzaga, had told her firmly:
It would not be good that I should go at present because it would appear that I was going expressly for this purpose. You cannot believe how she is displeased by such an error and perfidy on the part of Camillo and wants you to understand that she is yours and not given to flightiness and that you command her and she would see you very willingly were it possible. She says that Camillo is going away tomorrow, posting to France, and recommends herself to you infinitely. This is worthy of an answer concerning a visit [here] as I wrote to you in my last letter and in this.
Alfonso had little time to enjoy his firstborn before he was off again on another of his state missions, this time to the King of France to reassure him of his loyalty, given that the award to him of the Golden Rose by the Pope in April and his reconciliation with Venice might have aroused Louis’ suspicions. Gonzaga failed to rise to the opportunity proffered by Alfonso’s absence. He did not visit Lucrezia; instead he hastened to use the occasion of little Ercole’s birth to make things up with Alfonso. The Gonzaga secretary Benedetto Capilupo was sent expressly to Alfonso to congratulate him, with protestations of cordial and fraternal friendship which the goodhearted Alfonso told Capilupo he readily accepted. Proudly he took Capilupo to see his son and had him changed so that he could see that the naked baby ‘was fine and well equipped in everything’.11 Strozzi transmitted renewed vows of passion from Lucrezia and demands that Francesco Gonzaga should go to her. Instead, Gonzaga sent by one of his household a letter in his secretary’s hand saying that his illness continued. He still did not wish to commit himself to writing in his own hand which in those days was considered a proof of intimacy, instead dictating to a secretary which would make it appear more formal to any spying eye in Ferrara. Even this innocuous document has disappeared, although there are numerous letters by Lucrezia to Francesco in the Gonzaga archives at Mantua. (Francesco’s letters to her in the Este archives are limited to the years 1518-19.) ‘I cannot tell you how great is Madonna Barbara’s affection for you which could not be greater . . .,’ Strozzi told him: ‘she loves you to a considerable extent and considerably more than perhaps you think, because if you believed that she loved you as much as I have always told you, you would be warmer than you are in writing to her and coming to her wherever she might be . . .’ Strozzi urged Francesco to make every effort to put a visit to Lucrezia in train: ‘so that you will see how much she will caress you and then you will understand . . .’
Lucrezia had wanted to keep back the messenger so that she could write a letter to Francesco in her own hand, but childbirth had left her too weak to do so. She stressed that a reconciliation with Alfonso would be a good excuse for him to come to Ferrara and that before his departure Alfonso had said that such a move by Gonzaga would be welcome to him. She could hardly have made her feelings plainer: ‘[She] says you must do this [reconciliation] because you will soon be able to come to where she is.’ Emotional and confused, Lucrezia at one moment wanted to speed Strozzi on his way, the next asked him to stay and keep her company. ‘Write to her in any case so that it does not appear to her that you are cold,’ Strozzi implored him.12 This was Strozzi’s last known letter: whether or not Gonzaga did respond is unknown. But, using sickness as a pretext, he did not in the meantime venture from Mantua, probably still wary of the Este. Alfonso might have been absent but the more ruthless and hostile Ippolito was still there and often visited Lucrezia. Alfonso made an astonishingly rapid return from the French court on 13 May, going straight to visit Lucrezia and his son.
Violence was never far from Lucrezia’s life. Even as she rejoiced in her newborn son and the fulfilment of her duty as Duchess of Ferrara, which made her position impregnable, the murder of two people close to her reminded her of her Borgia days in Rome. On 5 June she wrote to Francesco Gonzaga: ‘On Sunday night around midnight Don Martino, a Spaniard, formerly a capellano of the late Duke my brother who has been in my service, was treacherously killed by brutal wounds in the face and head by a jealous Moor . . .’ Should the man, whom the bearer of the letter would describe, pass through Mantuan territory, she begged Francesco, according to the agreement he had with Alfonso, to arrest him and hand him over to her as ‘a homicide and traitor’. This young priest, di Prosperi reported, was the one who had helped the Duke Valentino escape. Having dined in the Palazzo del Corte with Lucrezia’s household, he was on his way to his room near the church of San Paolo when the attack occurred. The murderer was apparently never found.
That night of 5-6 June, three weeks after Alfonso’s return, an even more sinister murder occurred. On the morning of the 6th, Ercole Strozzi’s body was found in the middle of the road at the corner of the church of San Francesco, with twenty-two stab wounds in his body and his hair pulled out. His crutch lay beside him and he was wearing spurs, having ridden out on his mule to take a little fresh air and been ambushed by persons unknown. Despite his horrific wounds there was no blood on the ground: clearly he had been killed somewhere else and his body dumped by San Francesco. It was an obvious act of terror, of the kind which Cesare Borgia would not have hesitated to order, but why had it been committed? And by whom?
A week later di Prosperi was still uncertain as to the identity of Ercole Strozzi’s killers. Strozzi’s widow, Barbara Torelli, had also been the widow of Ercole di Sante Bentivoglio, with whom she had been on the bitterest of terms.Various names came up, including those of the Bentivoglio, who were hardly in a position to arrange such things at the time. Among them were Angela Borgia’s husband, Alessandro Pio da Sassuolo, for no conceivable reason other than the fact that his fierce mother was a Bentivoglio, and even Giovanni Sforza’s brother, Galeazzo, who had married one of Barbara’s daughters and was involved in a quarrel with his mother-in-law over his wife’s property in Bologna. ‘Of the malefactors and authors of the death of Messer Hercule Strozzi there are those who point one way, others another, but no one dares to speak for fear of coming up against a brick wall and voicing a dangerous opinion . . .,’ he wrote ten days later.
Ercole’s brothers, Lorenzo and Guido Strozzi (the first of whom had married another of Barbara’s daughters, Costanza), announcing his death on Barbara’s behalf to Francesco Gonzaga, exhorted him to carry out a vendetta against the murderers of‘such a faithful servant’ as Ercole had been to him. Barbara, recovering from the recent birth of her daughter by the murdered Ercole, also looked to Gonzaga for protection. Gonzaga had promised to stand as godfather to Barbara’s child, but cautiously after Ercole’s death deputed Tebaldeo to perform the office in his stead. It is noticeable that the Strozzi did not turn to the lord of Ferrara who, in the circumstances, could have been expected to institute investigation and punishment of the death of a man who, as a former Giudice dei XII Savi, had been a prominent administrator, a close friend of Lucrezia and a renowned poet and man of letters. Nothing happened, just as nothing had emerged after the deaths of Gandia and Bisceglie. Ercole Strozzi’s biographer Maria Wirtz cites a letter written twenty-four days after the murder by one Girolamo Comasco to Ippolito d’Este naming Masino del Forno as the author of the crime.13 Seizing a victim by the hair was a signature of del Forno’s operations, as had been noted in his violent arrest of Ippolito’s chamberlain, Cestatello, the previous year. Masino del Forno was one of the most loyal and ruthless of the senior Este brothers’ henchmen: if he was involved so were they, a fact which would explain the failure even to search for the killer. Two years later, in June 1510, Julius II openly accused Alfonso of the crime during an acrimonious interview with Alfonso’s envoy, Carlo Ruini. Julius was a man of explosive temperament, deeply hostile to Alfonso at that time, but he was exceptionally well informed and only the Pope could have made such an accusation without fear of the consequences.
Wirtz argues that Alfonso had Ercole Strozzi killed out of jealousy because he himself was in love with Barbara, and that the timing of the crime, only thirteen days after their alleged marriage, is significant. But di Prosperi had reported on 16 September the previous year that Ercole had married Barbara Torelli, and Strozzi himself had announced his marriage in distinctly unromantic terms to Gonzaga in a letter of 23 September. Wirtz and indeed most historians seem to be unaware of this, which destroys their theory of the significance of the marriage in provoking Alfonso’s homicidal jealousy. Jealousy there may have been on Alfonso’s part but not of Barbara Torelli – rather, of Lucrezia. Alfonso had never liked Ercole Strozzi and had removed him from office as soon as he could. But his most cogent reason for disliking Strozzi was the part he played as go-between in the romance between Lucrezia and Gonzaga. It may even have been a warning signal to Francesco. Although Alfonso, reserved and secretive as he was, never gave any sign that he knew of the clandestine correspondence between his wife and his brother-in-law, it is inconceivable that Ippolito’s intelligence system would not have picked up on it. Did his sister Isabella know or suspect something? It is entirely possible. Ferrara at night was as lawless as any other Italian city of the time, but it is not credible that such a violent murder could be committed by an ordinary criminal and the evidence of it, the body, dumped publicly in a main street in the city centre. Had it been any ordinary criminal, the Este would have been bound to pursue the case. They did not. Equally, they could have arranged for Strozzi simply to disappear. The violent nature of the incident and the alleged involvement of Masino del Forno point directly to Ippolito and Alfonso, who were not only constantly at odds with Francesco Gonzaga but also jealous for Este honour, touching as it did on the wife of Alfonso, mother of the Este heir, and the husband of Isabella.
Luzio absolves Alfonso of the murder, pointing the finger at the Bentivoglio, quoting from a letter which Barbara Torelli wrote to Gonzaga from Venice early the next year: ‘Who took my husband from me, is causing his children to lose their inheritance and seeking to threaten my life and make me lose my dowry . . .’ Yet in the next breath, Luzio claims that Alfonso was not only less bloodthirsty than had been rumoured but never left a crime unpunished, whatever the circumstances. In this case, however, he probably did. Luzio’s conclusion was that the Bentivoglio killed Ercole to revenge themselves on Barbara for her intransigence over her dowry. Ercole Strozzi, supported by Lorenzo Strozzi, had taken Barbara’s part in a dispute with her over her daughters’ dowries but since Lorenzo later joined forces with Barbara’s other son-in-law, Galeazzo Sforza, against her he can hardly have suspected the latter of involvement in Ercole’s murder. And why should anyone have been willing to protect the Bentivoglio, stateless, under interdict and enemies of the Pope as they were? Although the brothers Guido and Lorenzo Strozzi had made common cause with Barbara to beg Francesco Gonzaga to pursue a vendetta against the killer or killers of Ercole, there is no evidence that they took it further. After five hundred years, the crime remains unsolved: as in the Borgia days, the killer was too important to be identified. And in Ferrara that pointed to the Este as either instigators of or complicit in the murder of Ercole Strozzi. It is always possible that Ippolito was the prime mover but, if he was, he could not have done so without Alfonso’s agreement and Alfonso was in Ferrara when the crime took place.
The murder of Ercole Strozzi did not, however, deter Lucrezia from pursuing her passion for Gonzaga, although it certainly increased Gonzaga’s reluctance to take risks. As we have seen, Lucrezia was reckless and determined in pursuing her objectives. As a Borgia, she enjoyed an element of danger: she also thought she could get away with it. She knew Alfonso was devoted to her and she had recently borne him his longed-for son. She thought, probably rightly, that she could manage him if she continued their harmonious relations at every level and conducted her private passion with discretion. In any case in Alfonso’s absence she carried on a frequent official correspondence with Gonzaga on administrative matters. Somehow she induced Lorenzo Strozzi to step into his late brother’s shoes as go-between. From Finale en route to Reggio on 30 June 1508, only a few weeks after Ercole’s death, she wrote in her own hand a letter of recommendation to Gonzaga on behalf of Lorenzo who was to take it in person to Mantua: ‘Since Count Lorenzo Strozzi is coming to you as no less devoted a servant of yours than was Messer Hercole his brother, I could not fail to write these few lines both to remind you of my goodwill towards you and to recommend the Count in every occurrence when he may turn to you, you will also hear from him personal matters of mine. I pray you to give him faith as if he were myself.’ Strozzi’s reward was to be the favour of Francesco and Lucrezia. In another letter in her own hand of 19 October she thanked Francesco for the favour he had shown Strozzi in some case which has given her the greatest pleasure ‘for the love she bears the Count for his merit and virtues’.
This time no pseudonyms were used and the language was less passionate, so as not to arouse suspicion should it be intercepted. Strozzi signed the letters with his own name, but, reading between the lines, Lucrezia’s continuing desire to see her recalcitrant lover is evident. She was at Reggio, accompanied by Strozzi, when he wrote to Gonzaga, attempting to lure Gonzaga to a rendezvous with her. The language was formal, the intention clear. The Most Illustrious Duchess, he said, wanted to let Gonzaga know that within eight or ten days she would have to leave for Ferrara because of the Duke’s departure from there. But, because Her Ladyship wished to speak personally to him if possible, she urged him to come to Reggio because nothing in the world would give her more pleasure: ‘I reminded her that Your Lordship was confined to bed: she said she would order many prayers to be said at Reggio and in Ferrara that Your Lordship would soon be free [from his illness] and come to her. Also that if it were permitted it would not have been difficult for her to go there and speak to you and visit you. She regrets his illness as much as if it were her own. More she never heard that Your Lordship was in bed, or she would have sent a message of condolence which she will do.’ Lucrezia, he told Francesco, had been very ill of a bloody flux of which she has now recovered, but which prevented her from writing in her own hand to plead with him to come to Reggio by all means. ‘I excused you on the grounds that you will not be able to come but Her ladyship commanded me that in any case I write to you and I have done what she ordered . . .’ Lucrezia was so anxious for an answer, he said, that Francesco should either respond to his letter directly, where it would be delivered into her hands, or to Ferrara whence he would see that it ‘flew to her’.14
Gonzaga does seem to have been genuinely ill, as he wrote in a graceful, affectionate letter dictated to his formidable secretary, Tolomeo Spagnoli, Isabella’s bête noire, who was probably not unwilling to further his master’s romance with her rival. Only the state he was in, Gonzaga wrote, could have prevented him from seeing the Lady Duchess, his most cordial sister, whose good wishes and prayers have had a restorative effect. He had heard of her illness with great displeasure, for ‘such a fine body should be spared any infirmity’. He asked Strozzi to assure her that one of the principal reasons he wanted to be totally free of his malady was to see her again.15
Even one of Lucrezia’s jesters, ‘Martino de Amelia’, entered into the game, writing from Reggio addressing Francesco as ‘Illustrious Lord Marchese of Mantua, entirely the Duchess’s’ and describing how he had transformed himself into Gonzaga’s image to console the Duchess and amuse the Duke and the Cardinal. Lucrezia, he said, had thought of visiting him but was now not going (possibly because of the arrival of Alfonso and Ippolito), signing himself ‘Martin, your slave for the great love my Lady Duchess bears you’.16 Lucrezia herself followed this up three days later with a private note to be sent to Francesco by a messenger carrying a letter from Alfonso, who would tell him of her date of departure from Reggio. Through October and November, Lucrezia continued to send messages to Gonzaga via Strozzi, ostensibly asking him to further Strozzi’s cause.At times she would scribble her own notes with a covering letter from Strozzi; sometimes Strozzi would be the bearer of messages from her ‘which could not be written’. Gonzaga, however, remained in Mantua and Isabella visited Ferrara in November without him.
By this time relations between Francesco and Isabella were tense and contentious. For some years, more or less from the time that Lucrezia and Francesco had begun their relationship, the marriage had lacked affection. The letters between the couple evinced a ‘restrained formality’ and were mostly narrowly concerned with domestic matters.17 On 1 October 1506 Francesco, in a letter to a friend who was about to marry, complained discouragingly that his own marriage seemed to have lasted twenty-five rather than seventeen years,18 while, a few days after he wrote this, in a letter to him of 5 October Isabella complained pathetically that ‘he had loved her little for some time past’. By now, on almost every subject, however petty, Lucrezia and Francesco, abetted by Lorenzo Strozzi, lined up against Isabella, who was supported by Alfonso and Ippolito.The first row developed from Isabella’s visit to Ferrara when she persuaded her brothers that Lucrezia should take into her service a girl whom Francesco (probably from unworthy motives) wanted to remain in Mantua. At the behest of the three Este, Lucrezia was made to write to Mantua sending for the girl. She could not oppose Alfonso’s wishes, however much she would have liked to please Francesco, as she wrote in an apologetic note, joking that the girl represented a pledge which would bring Francesco to Ferrara: ‘Seriously my Lord, I could not have done more to serve you than I have done, but it has never been possible, for reasons which Count Lorenzo will write to you . . .’19 Strozzi backed her up, saying that Alfonso and Ippolito had insisted she take the girl and made her send the horseman to Isabella for this purpose ‘which on no account whatsoever Her Ladyship wished to do . . .’ Indeed, in order to avoid having to write the letter, Lucrezia had had recourse to the convent of Corpus Domini for four days, but to no avail.
The second casus belli was the tempestuous widow Barbara Torelli, who had been in Venice and whom Isabella had taken under her wing. When Lorenzo Strozzi had asked her help to reconcile him with Galeazzo Sforza so that they could unite against Barbara over their wives’ dowries, Isabella had rudely refused him. Now Torelli wished to return to Ferrara, her family home, to which Strozzi was strenuously opposed. Both he and Lucrezia believed that Isabella had supported the move and ‘to such effect that she had persuaded the Duke and the Cardinal to protect and comfort her’. Gonzaga had apparently sided with Strozzi over this but the combined weight of the three Este had prevented Lucrezia from interfering. ‘The Lady Duchess would do more for you than for anyone in the world,’ Strozzi wrote, ‘but in this case she has had to lay down her arms . . .’20