‘The Pope being a carnal man and very loving of his flesh and blood, this [relationship] will so establish the love of His Beatitude towards our house that no one will have the opportunity to divert him from us and draw him towards themselves’
– Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, to his brother Ludovico, Duke of Milan, on the marriage of Lucrezia to Giovanni Sforza, 3 February 1493
Alexander’s election had been unanimous; neither of his two most powerful rivals, cardinals Giuliano della Rovere (the future Pope Julius II), representing the interest of the Kingdom of Naples, nor Ascanio Sforza, representing the Duchy of Milan, could gain a majority Ascanio Sforza, seeing which way the wind was blowing, had swung his partisans behind Rodrigo and in return had received Borgia’s former office, the Vice-Chancellorship, his palace and various strongholds and benefices in his gift. The usual accusations of simony – the selling of holy offices for money – were raised: the diarist Stefano Infessura wrote that a train-load of mules laden with silver had been seen passing from Borgia’s palace to Sforza’s, but nothing could be proven beyond the usual wheeling and dealing which attended papal elections. Analysing the voting records of the conclave which resulted in Alexander’s election, the Borgias’ most authoritative historian, Michael Mallett, considered that Alexander won on merit.
Alexander VI was seen as an able ‘chief executive’ who could lead the Church through increasingly dangerous times. Even the Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini, no friend of the Borgias, admitted his capabilities: ‘Alexander VI possessed singular cunning and sagacity, excellent judgement, a marvellous efficacy in persuading, and an incredible dexterity and attentiveness in dealing with weighty matters’, he wrote. (These qualities, however, he added, were ‘far outweighed by his vices: the most obscene behaviour, insincerity, shamelessness, lying, faithlessness, impiety, insatiable avarice, immoderate ambition, a cruelty more barbaric and a most ardent cupidity to exalt his numerous children: and among these were several (in order that depraved instruments might not be lacking to carry out his depraved designs) no less detestable than the father . . .)I
Lucrezia’s third betrothal and later marriage to Giovanni Sforza, lord of Pesaro, signed on 2 February 1493 and executed by proxy while Sforza was in Pesaro, demonstrated the complete ruthlessness with which Alexander deployed his daughter, still a child even by the standards of the day It was simply a cynical and temporary response to a temporary situation: by marrying his daughter to a connection of Ascanio Sforza he was not only demonstrating publicly his debt of gratitude for his election but punishing the Sforzas’ enemy, Ferrante, the Aragonese King of Naples, for a hostile move against himself the previous September. In the complex minuet – even tit for tat – of Italian high politics, King Ferrante of Naples, angered by Alexander’s alliance with Ascanio, had financially backed a move by the Orsini family in September 1492 to buy the castles of Cerveteri and Anguillara near Rome in an attempt to put a stranglehold on the Pope in the first weeks of his papacy In the month before Lucrezia’s betrothal Alexander had negotiated a new line-up of Italian powers with the League of St Mark linking the papacy to Venice and Milan. The child bride Lucrezia was to be a pledge to the Sforzas and a signal to the powers beyond Rome of Alexander’s independence. A letter from Ascanio Sforza to his brother Ludovico, announcing the signing of the contract and proxy ceremony the previous night, made clear the importance the Sforzas attached to the marriage: ‘The Pope being a carnal man and very loving of his flesh and blood, this [relationship] will so establish the love of His Beatitude towards our house that no one will have the opportunity to divert him from us and draw him towards themselves.’2 The envoys of the King of Naples, he told Ludovico, had gone to infinite pains in recent days to prevent the Sforza marriage, offering instead as a husband for Lucrezia the son of the Duke of Calabria, Ferrante’s grandson (who later became Lucrezia’s second husband) with great material inducements. To circumvent the Neapolitan efforts, the proxy ceremony was carried out in the greatest secrecy at the Pope’s request – only the Cardinal of Monreale, Cesare, Juan, Ascanio, the Milanese ambassador, Stefano Taberna, four of the Pope’s chamberlains and the notary who drew up the contract were party to the affair. Giovanni Sforza was to be given a condotta (a military contract to raise and pay a specified number of troops to the profit of the provider, or condottiere) by the Pope subsidized by the Duke of Milan.3 Lucrezia brought with her a dowry of 31,000 ducats.
In dynastic terms of prestige and wealth it was not a great marriage. Giovanni Sforza was a minor prince, the illegitimate son of Costanzo Sforza, Count of Cotignola, the original but far less powerful line of the family to which Ludovico il Moro and Ascanio belonged. Pesaro, a beautiful town on the Adriatic coast of Italy, strategically situated on the Via Emilia, had only been taken over by Giovanni’s grandfather, Alessandro, in 1445. Alessandro-a ruthless husband who had twice tried to poison, and then to strangle his second wife, before forcing her into a convent – was otherwise a civilized man who employed the best architects and artists to beautify the town. The court at Pesaro was famous for its festivities: Alessandro expanded his connections with all the great families of Italy and founded a superb library His son Costanzo, Giovanni’s father, a cousin of Ascanio Sforza, made his court a centre for poets and scholars, and married into the Aragonese royal family; his bride was Camilla d’Aragona, niece of King Ferrante. But the marriage produced no legitimate heirs, so Giovanni, the eldest of two illegitimate sons, succeeded as lord in 1483. He enjoyed an annual revenue of 12,000 ducats but, like many lords with a court to maintain, was perennially short of money and earned his living as a condottiere. Giovanni Sforza was handsome and well-connected, not only through his Sforza relations in Milan, but his first wife, Maddalena Gonzaga, had been the sister of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, and of Elisabetta, wife of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. He was, however, utterly dependent on his powerful Sforza relations, Ascanio and Ludovico, and had as little choice in the marriage as Lucrezia; he did what the elder Sforzas told him and was destined to play only a fleeting part in Lucrezia’s life.
The Sforza marriage took place under the veils of secrecy and dissimulation customary in Alexander’s manoeuvres. As early as 4 November 1492, the Mantuan envoy Jacopo d’Atri reported that Giovanni Sforza was staying secretly in the house of the Cardinal of San Clemente, and that the negotiations for his marriage to Lucrezia were far advanced. Secrecy was necessary because Lucrezia’s previous fiance, Procida, had come to Rome to claim his bride, declaring that his marriage had been negotiated by means of the King of Spain. ‘is much gossip about Pesaro’s marriage,’ the Ferrarese envoy wrote to his master, Duke Ercole d’Este. ‘The first bridegroom is still here, raising a great hue and cry, as a Catalan. . .’4 By a curious twist of fate the man who was to become Lucrezia’s third husband, Alfonso d’Este, son of Duke Ercole, was a guest in the Vatican at the time and visited Lucrezia.5 Procida eventually accepted defeat, compensated by a considerable sum of money in the form of a condotta from the Pope, subsidized by the Duke of Milan, in order to buy his silence and give way to Giovanni Sforza.6 At any rate he was registered as among the leading members of Juan Gandia’s household in Valencia the following year.7
Lucrezia’s marriage to Giovanni Sforza was celebrated with due pomp and festivity in the Vatican on 12 June 1493. Sforza had made a solemn entry into Rome two days earlier, having returned to Pesaro in the interim. The timing of his arrival and indeed of his marriage had been delayed, dictated by Ascanio Sforza’s need to seek the advice of his astrologers as to the most favourable date, which irritated the Pope. As it turned out, the astrologers’ choice of date made no difference to what was to be an ill-starred marriage. Lucrezia saw her husband-to-be for the first time when he arrived outside the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico to pay his respects to her from a distance. He must have seemed old to her – he was twenty-six and a widower – although he was handsome enough with a long, straight nose, a fashionable beard and flowing hair. Lucrezia was only just thirteen but no innocent, given the close proximity in which she lived with her father’s teenage mistress, Giulia Farnese.
The Pope spared no expense to show off his daughter, endowing her with a sumptuous trousseau which was rumoured to include a dress reputedly worth 15,000 ducats.8 Giovanni himself had borrowed jewellery from the Gonzaga to put on a good show, and was dressed for his wedding in a long Turkish-style robe of curled cloth of gold, with the Gonzaga gold chain round his neck. At the Pope’s orders he was accompanied to the Vatican by the Roman barons and a flock of bishops to a great hall crowded with the noblewomen of Rome. Cesare and Juan Gandia slipped in through a secret door, the younger Borgia dressed with his usual ostentation, in a ‘Turcha’, like the bridegroom’s, of curled cloth of gold down to the floor, his sleeves embroidered with large pearls, a chain of balas rubies and pearls of great price at his neck and wearing a beret studded with a jewel estimated to be worth 150,000 ducats.
The bride herself was described by one observer as ‘very beautiful’ (‘assai bella’), in a splendid dress and jewels. She was flanked by the daughter of Niccolὸ Orsini, Count of Pitigliano, married to Giulia Farnese’s brother, Angelo, and by Giulia herself, who quite outshone her and was described by an onlooker as ‘truly beautiful to behold and said to be the Pope’s favourite’. The bride and groom knelt at the Pope’s feet while the Count of Pitigliano held a naked sword above them and an archbishop pronounced the marriage ceremony Afterwards the Pope led them into an outer room where a ‘very polished’ pastoral eclogue by Serafino was performed, followed by Plautus’s comedy The Menaechmi, in Latin, which bored Alexander who ordered it to be cut short. There was a lavish presentation of wedding presents in the form of magnificent silver from, among others, Cesare, Ascanio and the Duke of Ferrara.9 After a light collation the couple were accompanied to the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico by all the barons, prelates and ladies, and that night the Pope gave a ‘most sumptuous’ private dinner for the gentlemen at which Ascanio Sforza and his Milanese ally, Cardinal Sanseverino, were prominent guests.10 There was to be no bedding of the bride as was customary since the Pope had ordered that the marriage was not to be consummated before November, either out of consideration for his daughter’s age or, equally likely, to enable him to have it dissolved on the grounds of non-consummation in case it no longer suited his plans.
Within a week of Lucrezia’s marriage to Sforza, the wily Alexander was hedging his diplomatic bets. Don Diego Lopez de Haro, envoy extraordinary from the King and Queen of Spain, came to offer the Pope homage on their behalf. It was the first prong of a pincer movement designed to draw Alexander back towards the Aragonese cause in Naples. Lopez de Haro advised Alexander that King Ferdinand ‘regarded the affairs of Naples as his own’ while proffering an irresistible bait: the revival of the marriage project between the Borgias and the royal family of Aragon which had been planned before the death of Pedro Luis. Juan Gandia had taken his late half-brother’s place as the fiance of Dona Maria Enriques, the King’s cousin. Alexander leapt hungrily at the lure, hoping, as he told his son Juan, not only for the royal connection but, through Isabella, the prospect of obtaining former Moorish estates in the recently conquered Kingdom of Granada. The Catalan bargaining between king and pope extended to the all-important resolution of the quarrel between Spain and Portugal over the right to explore and colonize the New World, opened up by Columbus’s landing on Hispaniola which had become known in Rome in March of that year.
Hard on the Spanish envoy’s heels came Federigo d’Aragona, the second son of King Ferrante of Naples (whose death had occurred in January), desperate to prevent Alexander promising the investiture of the Kingdom of Naples to Charles VIII of France. He offered a secret engagement between Jofre Borgia and Sancia, an illegitimate daughter of Ferrante’s successor, Alfonso Duke of Calabria, and to negotiate peace between Alexander and Virginio Orsini, who held a condotta from the King of Naples, and who was to pay the Pope a large sum in return for the investiture of the castles of Cerveteri and Anguillara. A reconciliation was arranged between Alexander and Giuliano della Rovere. Within weeks all was settled, Juan Gandia left early in August for his wedding in Barcelona, shortly after the publication of the socalled Alexandrine Bulls which resolved the question of the New World on terms favourable to Spain, while on 17 August Jofre was married by proxy to Sancia. Alexander’s diplomacy had won hands down, with rich marriages for his children, money and independence for himself. Although he intended to keep on good terms with all parties, his new pro-Aragonese stance did not in the end bode well for the Sforzas.
‘This Duke [Gandia] leaves very rich and loaded with jewels, money and other valuable portable goods and silver. It is said he will return within a year but leave all his goods in Spain and come back to reap another harvest,’ the Mantuan envoy reported.II A document from the archives of Valencia cathedral headed ‘Inventory of the property which His Holiness Our Lord ordered to be put in caskets for the Lord Duke’ provides a truly staggering view of the ostentatious wealth and resources of the Borgias. Boxes and boxes of rich velvet, damask, brocade, cloth of silver, satin and furs were loaded aboard his ship, curtains, cushions, bedcovers studded with gold, bed hangings in white damask brocade with gold fringes and crimson satin lining, tapestries woven with the history of Alexander the Great, and of Moses, huge quantities of table silver engraved with the ducal arms. One box contained jewels for Gandia and his duchess: a pendant to be worn in his cap consisted of a great emerald with a huge diamond above it, and a large pendant pearl, and a golden cross studded with pearls and diamonds to be given to the Duchess in which the Pope with his own hands had placed a piece of the True Cross.12
Even before he left, Alexander had issued Juan with firm instructions to make sure that he was assiduous in his attentions to the Spanish royal family, and particularly to the Queen, in order to obtain the fine estate which Lopez de Haro had indicated would be given to him.13 Alexander’s instructions to Gandia’s treasurer and secretary, Genis Fira and Jaume de Pertusa, were equally commanding: he hoped for great things for Juan of the Spanish sovereigns – the marquisate of Denia in Valencia and, beyond that, a lordship in the Kingdom of Granada, adding pertinently that he expected both – ‘one favour does not prevent another’.14
But in his greedy haste and joy Alexander had neglected his usual caution. Gandia received a splendid reception when he reached Barcelona on 24 August, and Alexander prepared the last and most important of the Bulls opening the way for Castile to conquer any lands in the west not yet occupied by other Christian powers. The Bull was promulgated on 25 September but, preoccupied with other matters, neither Ferdinand nor Isabella attended Gandia’s wedding at the end of the month, nor were any favours yet forthcoming. While Isabella the Catholic thought it unseemly to be granting favours to the Pope’s bastard, Ferdinand saw Gandia as a useful hostage to ensure Alexander’s loyalty over Naples should he have to intervene, and his interest lay in prolonging the affair. Alexander was mortified: he was still more so as reports began to come in of Juan’s bad behaviour and neglect of his wife, including an (unfounded) accusation of non-consummation of the marriage, which roused him to fury Even Cesare, newly promoted as Cardinal of Valencia by his father, wrote a reproving elder brotherly letter to Juan, in Valencian Catalan, the family language, at his father’s instigation:
However great my joy and happiness at being promoted cardinal, and they were certainly considerable, my annoyance was greater still when I heard of the bad reports His Holiness had received of you and your behaviour. Letters . . . have informed His Holiness that you had been going round Barcelona at night, killing cats and dogs, making frequent visits to the brothel, gambling for large sums, speaking disrespectfully and imprudently to important people, showing disobedience to Don Enrich and Dona Maria [Juan’s father and mother-in-law] and finally acting throughout in a way inconsistent with a gentleman of your position.15
Juan’s bad behaviour and, most of all, the report of his non-consummation of the marriage, frightened and disturbed Alexander who was not comforted by the report he received from his nuncio, Desprats, of a conversation he had had with Queen Isabella, who, he said, ‘had received great annoyance and displeasure from certain things concerning Your Beatitude, principally those which were such that they caused scandal . . ., specifically the festivities at the wedding of Dona Lucrecia, and the creation of the cardinals, that is of Valencia [Cesare Borgia] and the Cardinal Farnese [Giulia’s brother, Alessandro] . . . Desprats’ advice to the Pope was not to pursue the cause of Gandia and his siblings with such fervour.
Among other family duties expected of Gandia were the execution of certain commissions given him by his father, specifically ‘small tiles’ (rajoletes) for the decoration of the Borgia Apartments in the Vatican, and by ‘his dearest sister’ Lucrezia. An accounts book of 27 January to 29 June 1494 lists money for various presents for Lucrezia, including gold jewellery and shoes: ‘sandals of gold and silk: 168 escudos for the sandals and shoes of the Lady Lucrecia . . . three hand lengths of blue satin to make two pairs of sandals for the Illustrious Lady Lucrecia’.16
In Rome, with the spotlight on the male members of her family, Lucrezia slipped from the attention of observers, who, however, recorded that Giovanni Sforza, as a result of a case of plague in his household, had gone out of Rome to Civita Castellana on 4 August.17 There was no mention of Lucrezia going with him and at the end of that month Alexander was reported to be considering leaving Rome to get fresh air, because he was in danger of the plague and felt constricted in the Vatican as did ‘our children’ (‘nostri nepoti’).18 Cesare was out of Rome at Caprarola in August and with Alexander in Viterbo in October. The Pope had left Rome after the stormy consistory in which he had finally succeeded in imposing his will on the rebellious cardinals and pushing through the blatantly nepotistic nominations of Cesare and Farnese, and also of the fifteen-year-old Ippolito d’Este. Otherwise, Alexander had been politically evenhanded in his nominations for the cardinalate; only Ferrante of Naples, to his fury, was unrewarded.
Lucrezia was certainly in Rome at the beginning of November when Cattaneo reported that Giovanni Sforza was expected there ‘to do reverence to His Holiness Our Lord and to keep company in all respects [‘accompagnarsi in tuto’] with his wife’. The clear inference was that Sforza had been given permission to consummate his marriage, although this is the only contemporary evidence we have that he did so. Lucrezia, still only thirteen, was clearly of adult intelligence, since Cattaneo spoke of her as ‘a most worthy lady and very favourable to the cause of our Monsignore’ (Sigismondo Gonzaga, Francesco’s brother, for whom the Gonzaga were urgently pressing elevation to the cardinalate). Gonzaga’s friends, he said, strongly recommended that the Marquis treat Lucrezia as a ‘sister and sister-in-law’ (sorella e cugnata) and pay more attention to her than he had in the past, ‘especially her being the daughter of [the Pope]’ and ‘full of goodwill’ towards Gonzaga.19
The direct route to papal favour led through the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico, as the astute princes of Italy and their envoys were well aware. Adriana de Mila marshalled the suitors, while Lucrezia and Giulia, the women Alexander loved most, obtained the results. As Girolama Farnese, Giulia’s sister, wrote to her husband, the Florentine Puccio Pucci, on 21 October 1493, ‘You will have received letters . . . and have learned . . . all that Giulia has secured . . . and you will be greatly pleased.’20 Pucci’s brother, Lorenzo, who was in Rome that winter, left a vivid description of the domestic scene at Santa Maria in Portico on Christmas Eve, when he visited Giulia and found her drying her hair by the fire with Lucrezia and Adriana. After Lorenzo had thanked her for her favours to his family, Giulia replied, ‘that such a trifle deserved no thanks. She hopes to be of still greater help to me, and says I shall find her so at the right time. Madonna Adriana joined in saying I might be certain that . . . it was owing to the favour of Madonna Giulia herself that I had obtained the benefices . . . Madonna Giulia asked with much interest after Messer Puccio and said, “We will see to it that some day he will come here as ambassador: and although, when he was here, we, in spite of our endeavours, were unable to effect it, we could now accomplish it without any difficulty.’” Also present was Giulia’s daughter, Laura, born the previous year and generally reputed, although almost certainly without foundation, to be the Pope’s child. Alexander, devoted as he was to his children, never showed the slightest interest in her, and the evidence of a jealous letter he was to write to Giulia suggests that he was convinced Laura was Orsino’s child. Pucci described Giulia as ‘a most beautiful creature. She let her hair down before me and had it dressed; it reached down to her feet; never have I seen anything like it; she has the most beautiful hair. She wore a headdress of fine linen, and over it a sort of net, light as air, with gold threads woven in it. In truth it shone like the sun!’ Lucrezia, perhaps irritated by Pucci’s obvious admiration for Giulia’s beauty, left the room to change from a ‘robe lined in the Neapolitan fashion’ similar to the one Giulia was wearing, and returned soon afterwards wearing ‘a gown almost entirely of violet velvet’.
Giovanni Sforza himself boasted to the Mantuan envoy Brognolo that ‘all these ladies who have access to the pontiff’ were worth cultivating, but ‘principally his wife’. ‘I hear from all quarters,’ Brognolo informed Francesco Gonzaga, ‘that she [Lucrezia] has great access and could not be better, and certainly I understand that for her age she has great intelligence . . . I wished to inform Your Lordship of this in order that you should understand that the majority of those who want favours [of the Pope] pass through this door and it has already been signalled to me that it would be good to show some gratitude . . .’21 The Gonzaga sent presents of prized fish (carpioni) from Lake Garda and cheese to the Pope, food appropriate for the Lenten season. Alexander turned to one of his Spanish intimates and told him to see that these were distributed to Cesare ‘and to the ladies’.22 But hard currency, a commodity always in short supply at Mantua, was necessary, Brognolo bluntly told Isabella d’Este, wife of Francesco, a few days later. Money was offered but, for reasons of his own, Alexander told the envoy not to send it at present but to defer it for a week. Jewels, however, were acceptable – for Lucrezia, as the envoy sent to present them informed Francesco Gonzaga, but Giovanni Sforza advised him that he had better keep the jewels intended for Giulia ‘since the Pope would take it badly’.23
Giovanni Sforza was clinging to his marriage and to Lucrezia, his all-important link with the Pope in what was, from his point of view, an increasingly dangerous political situation. King Ferrante of Naples had died in January and on 22 March 1494 Alexander announced that the investiture of the Crown of Naples should go, not to Charles VIII of France, as the French King had demanded, but to the late King Ferrante’s son, Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, who would be crowned by Cardinal Juan Borgia. The French invasion of Italy with the conquest of Naples as its object was now a virtual certainty. Sforza’s position that spring of 1494 was an uncomfortable one: a plaintive letter to his patron Ludovico retailed an awkward conversation with the Pope:
Yesterday His Holiness said to me in the presence of Monsignor [Ascanio] ‘Well, Giovanni Sforza! What have you to say to me?’ I answered, ‘Holy Father, every one in Rome believes that Your Holiness has entered into an agreement with the King of Naples, who is an enemy of the State of Milan. If this is so, I am in an awkward position, as I am in the pay of Your Holiness and also in that of the State I have named [Milan]. If things continue as they are, I do not know how I can serve one party without falling out with the other . . . I ask that Your Holiness may be pleased to define my position so that I may not act contrary to the obligations into which I have entered by virtue of my agreement with Your Holiness and the illustrious State of Milan . . .
Alexander replied coldly that he should choose in whose pay he should remain according to his contract.24 Both the Pope and the Duke of Milan wanted to dominate the unfortunate lord of Pesaro ‘and make use of his state’, as Ascanio had written to his brother in cipher earlier that month,25but the Pope was determined that Milan should pay the cost of his condotta. Ascanio advised his brother that in the Sforza interest it would be better if Giovanni were in Pesaro, out of the Pope’s clutches.
Giovanni, wishing to keep in with both sides, put a brave face on the situation, for in a letter of 18 April 1494, addressed to Juan Gandia, with whom he appeared to be on the most friendly terms, he thanked him for a letter in which Gandia had expressed his joy at the kindness with which the Pope had received Sforza on his return and informed him that he would be leaving shortly for Pesaro to put his affairs in order, to reform his troops and pay them, and that Lucrezia would be accompanying him.26 As a postscript and additional sweetener he offered to obtain the Sicilian horses Juan wanted from the King of Naples. But Alexander’s switch in allegiances was underscored the following month by a Borgia marriage in Naples and lavish grants of money and titles to Alexander’s children. On the day of his coronation, 8 May, the new King Alfonso granted Juan Borgia the principate of Tricario, the counties of Carinola, Claramonte and Luria and other lands, each worth 12,000 ducats a year. Jofre was made prince of Squillace, count of Cariaci and protonotary of the Realm with an income of 12,000 golden ducats. Three days later the marriage was celebrated of Jofre to Alfonso’s illegitimate daughter, the princess Sancia, who was at least three years older than him. ‘He consummated his marriage to the illustrious Dona Sancha, his wife, and performed very well, notwithstanding he is not more than thirteen years old,’ Alexander wrote to Gandia.27
Although Juan was now known to have consummated his marriage and his wife was pregnant, his extravagance continued to disgust Alexander who had showered him with money and obtained new titles and rich revenues for him.28 Alexander’s unholy love of money and property is revealed in this letter: ‘. . . your procurators have taken peaceful and expeditious possession in your name of the principate of Tricario, the County of Carinola, Claramonte and Luria and of all your other lands, which, according to their descriptions are lands of greater income even than the King offered, easily more than 12,000 ducats, fine, large and full’, he told Gandia gleefully before he burst out into the rage of a self-made man well aware of the value of money, over his son’s wasteful dissipation of his funds.
Gandia was by now homesick for his family and longing to return to Rome, as a letter to Lucrezia in the Valencia archives (written but apparently never sent) shows:
I feel a great desire to have news of you for it has been a great while since I received a letter from you and you can imagine, my lady sister, what a great joy your letters are to me for the love I bear you. So do me the favour of writing for my consolation, because already the Duchess my wife complains a great deal of you, that you have never written despite all the letters sent to you from here. She commands us to ask you to write, she is pregnant and in the seventh month. It seems two years since I left. I have written to His Beatitude to order my departure and from day to day I hope for this order . . . I commend myself to the lord of Pesaro, my dear brother, and similarly to Madama Adriana and Madama Julia . . .29
Probably around the same time (September 1494) he sent a similar letter to Cesare, imploring him to intercede with the Pope to send galleys to take him to Italy: ‘Each day seems like a year to me in the delay of those ships which His Holiness has written in recent days he will send soon . . .’
Despite the political situation, Giovanni Sforza was still in favour with the Borgias: in May, Alexander gave permission for Lucrezia, Adriana and Giulia to visit Pesaro for the first time. A collection of his private papers which remained hidden in the archives of the Castel Sant’ Angelo for over a hundred years reveals the Pope’s extraordinary dependence on ‘his women’, his love for Lucrezia and obsession with his beautiful young mistress. The party arrived in Pesaro on 8 June in heavy rain to a tumultuous welcome, as Lucrezia reported to her father, finding themselves provided with a ‘beautiful and comfortable house with all the furnishings and gaieties which could be required’.30 Adriana wrote the same day, praising Pesaro and the care with which its tactful lord attended to her every desire. Both women were, however, alarmed by the report brought by Messer Francesco (Francesc, in his native language) Gacet, a Catalan confidant of the dangerous position in which Alexander found himself in Rome, not merely from the plague but from the pro-French enemies (the Colonna, in particular) who were encircling him. ‘Messer Francesco will have informed you,’ Lucrezia wrote, ‘how we have all understood that at the present time [things] are going very badly [at] Rome, and that we are upset and sorrowful that Your Sanctity should be there. I implore Your Beatitude as much as I can to leave and if you do not wish to, take great care and diligence to guard yourself. And Your Beatitude must not take this as presumption but due to the great and cordial love I bear you and be certain that I will never be content until I hear frequent news of Your Beatitude.’ Adriana backed her up with expressions of concern that Alexander remained in Rome in the face of such danger, assuring him that he had nothing to worry about in Pesaro because ‘these ladies’ (Lucrezia and Giulia) were following his orders and were continually together. Orsino, who must have accompanied his errant wife to Pesaro, also recommended himself, she said, to His Lordship. One Giulia d’Aragona, a member of the numerous royal house of Naples, who accompanied the party, enlarged on the welcome and festivities at Pesaro where she, Giovanni, Lucrezia and Giulia Farnese, in robes of ‘pontifical splendour’, had danced among the crowds who were astounded by their magnificence. But she assured him that rumours of their total enjoyment were wrong, that both she and Lucrezia were counting the days until they could be with him again. She mentioned her brother, Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona, who was so pleased with the negotiations between the Pope and the new King of Naples that he felt ‘as if the Pope had once again made him Cardinal’.31 No woman, it seems, could ever write to Alexander without attempting to wheedle some favour out of him: four days later, she appealed to him to grant the benefice of the recently murdered Bishop of Rimini to her brother. In a postscript she hinted at some watching brief entrusted to her by the Pope, no doubt concerning the movements of Giulia Farnese, whom the besotted Pope was anxious should return to him as soon as possible. He addressed a long letter to Adriana asking her when the party intended to return and whether Giovanni Sforza would accompany them or remain in Pesaro. He was expecting them at the end of June or beginning of July and would himself return to Rome to meet them. He would expect Giovanni Sforza to remain in Pesaro to raise troops and defend his state, but did not think it advisable that the women should stay there in view of the number of troops wandering the country ahead of the French invasion.
In fact, the high-spirited Lucrezia was enjoying herself too much at Pesaro to write regularly to her embattled father. She excused herself on the grounds that she had been waiting for the letters she and Julia had just received, and because on Sunday the celebrated beauty Caterina Gonzaga had arrived and was still there. Caterina’s charms were already known to the Borgias: earlier that year one Jacopo Dragoni had written a humorous Latin poem to Cesare, the ‘Divine Caesar, Cardinal Valentia’, advising him to ‘lay siege to the town of San Lorenzo’, where Caterina lived with her husband (i.e. to seduce Caterina), and referring to her husband Ottaviano in contemptuous terms.32 It is not known whether Cesare took this advice. Lucrezia’s account of Caterina was dismissive:
Firstly, she is taller than Madonna Giulia, she has beautiful skin and hands and her figure is also beautiful but her mouth is ugly and her teeth very ugly indeed, her eyes large and pale [?grey], her nose is more ugly than beautiful, a long face and the colour of her hair is ugly and she has a distinctly mannish appearance. I wanted to see her dance and it was not a very satisfactory performance. In fact in all things she does not measure up to her reputation and in my opinion [compare] with the Lady whom I hold as my mother [Adriana] and Madonna Julia whom I hold as my sister . . . 33
Lucrezia and Caterina did in fact become close friends, a connection which Caterina was eager to exploit in a letter written around this time to the Pope – ostensibly by Lucrezia but actually in Caterina’s hand and signed by both women early in July 1494 – in which they earnestly recommended Caterina’s husband, Count Ottaviano da Montevegio, to Alexander’s protection against his enemies.34 Caterina followed up this letter with another written on her return home to San Lorenzo praising Lucrezia to the skies for her spirit, intelligence and ‘attitudes of a true Lady’ and for her friendship. Her own sanity had been restored by the return of her husband from Rome when she had been led to believe he was dead. Now she asked Alexander for support against her brother-in-law, Roberto da Montevegio, and enemies who had taken her rents and were threatening to kill her.
Giulia Farnese had contributed her own description of Caterina’s charms in a letter to her ageing lover which produced a doting response:
Julia, darling daughter, a letter we received from you, the longer it was the more it was pleasing to us, so that it took more time to read, although to extend yourself in the description of the beauties of that person who could not be worthy to fit your shoes, we know how she behaves in all other things and does not do so with great modesty. And we know this to be a fact which you well know because everyone who writes to you says that next to you she appeared as a mere lantern near a sun, making out that she is quite beautiful, we thus understand your perfection, of which truly we have never been in doubt. And we wish that like us you recognize this clearly . . . and that no other woman is loved. And when you make this deliberation, we will acknowledge you as no less wise than you are perfect . . .35
As he knew that the three women (Adriana, Lucrezia and Giulia) read each other’s letters from him, he said, there was no need for further news.
Alexander was obsessed with his sexual passion for Giulia but he adored his daughter and was thrown into transports of panic at rumours going round Rome at the end of June that Lucrezia was dead, or her life despaired of. ‘Dona Lucretia, most beloved daughter,’ he wrote. ‘Truly you have given us four or five days of grief and grave worry over the bitter news that has spread throughout Rome that you were dead or truly fallen into such infirmity that there could be no hope for your life. You can imagine how such a rumour affected my spirits for the warm and immense love that I have for you. And until I saw the letter which you wrote in your hand, although it was so badly written that it showed you were unwell, I have enjoyed no peace of mind. Let us thank God and Our Glorious Lady that you have escaped all danger. And thus we will never be [truly] content until we have seen you in person.’ Giovanni Sforza ‘our most dear son’, had written to him complaining that the Sforza had given him neither the condotta nor money, nothing but words. Alexander, having recently abandoned Milan, the French and the Sforza and come down firmly on the side of the Aragonese of Naples, suggested that Giovanni should follow his example and take service instead with the new King of Naples, Alfonso, whom he, Alexander, was shortly to meet. Cardinal Ascanio, he told her, ‘from suspicion and fear’ of King Alfonso, had left Rome.36
In the circumstances he was furious to learn that in mid July Giulia, accompanied by Adriana, had left Pesaro without his permission, to attend the sickbed of her brother, Angelo, at the family estate of Capodimonte. In fact, on reaching Capodimonte they found Angelo already dead, which, according to Alexander, caused Giulia and her brother the cardinal such distress that they fell sick of the fever. The Pope sent them one of his doctors but vented his rage and frustration on Lucrezia: ‘Truly Lord Giovanni and yourself have displayed very little thought for me in this departure of Madonna Adriana and Giulia, since you allowed them to leave without our permission: for you should have remembered – it was your duty – that such a sudden departure without our knowledge would cause us the greatest displeasure . . .’37 Lucrezia responded immediately to her father’s furious missive:
‘Concerning the departure of the aforementioned Lady [Giulia], truly Your Holiness should not complain of either my lord or myself: because when the news of the grave illness of Signor Angelo arrived, Madonna Hadriana and Donna Julia decided at all costs to leave immediately. We tried with every efficacy to dissuade them that it was better to await the opinion of Your Beatitude, whose licence would permit them to leave. But so great was their pain and their desire to see him alive that no persuasion was sufficient to keep them here. Indeed with supreme difficulty I persuaded them to wait a little, hoping that so their anxiety and determination [to leave] might abate a little. When the messenger arrived with the news that he was worse, no persuasion, reasoning or prayers could prevail since they resolved immediately to take horse and go there against every wish of my lord and myself. And the cause of it all was only the tenderness they felt at such a loss. And truly if it had not been forbidden to me I should have kept them company. Your Lordship can be certain that I felt cordial displeasure and extreme bitterness: both for the loss of such a lord whom I held as a good brother, and also because I was displeased precisely because it happened without the knowledge and will of Your Beatitude, and because I missed their amiable and sweet company. All the same, I have no power over the deliberations of others. They themselves can be witnesses that I did not fail in any way to try to keep them here. I beseech you not to take from this a bad impression of my lord or myself, nor to condemn us for something which was not my fault.38
Turning to politics, she commented with a sagacity unusual in a woman of her age, congratulating Alexander on the results to be hoped for from his meeting with King Alfonso at Vicovaro near Tivoli on 14 July and the prospects of an agreement with the Colonna.
Despite the optimistic note in Lucrezia’s letter, Alexander’s position in Rome was becoming more dangerous by the minute. His principal enemy and rival at the papal court, Giuliano della Rovere, had fled to France demanding the convocation of a General Council to depose Alexander on the grounds of simony. ‘If Cardinal Giuliano can be got to ally himself with France,’ the Milanese envoy Stefano Taberna had written on 2 May, ‘a tremendous weapon will have been forged against the Pope.’ On 17 March, Charles VIII had announced his intention of invading Italy, and the news that Giuliano had allied himself with him and his call for a General Council seriously alarmed Alexander. At the end of June, Ascanio Sforza had fled Rome to join the Colonna and succeeded in suborning them from their allegiance to Naples. Ascanio too now demanded a General Council to depose the Pope. Alexander, therefore, was threatened on all sides. At his meeting with King Alfonso of Naples at Vicovaro on 14 July, it was agreed that Virginio Orsini, head of the clan, should remain in the Roman Campagna to keep the Colonna in check, while the mass of the Neapolitan troops under Alfonso’s eldest son, Ferrantino, supported by their allies, the Florentines, should make their way north. None of this deterred the King of France: assured of the neutrality of Venice and Milan, he crossed the border between France and Savoy, marching southward.
Yet in the midst of all his troubles, Alexander’s yearning to see his mistress was at the forefront of his mind. Giulia Farnese was also in an awkward position. Her husband, Orsino Orsini, far from being complacent at her public and scandalous association with the Pope, had remained at Città di Castello on the pretext of illness so that he would not have to join the Neapolitan forces, and was determined that Giulia should return to him at Bassanello. Alexander, however, prevailed on Virginio Orsini to order Orsino to join the Neapolitan camp of the Duke of Calabria. Virginio, in Rome to confer with the Pope about the betrayal of Ostia to his hereditary enemies, the Colonna and their Savelli allies, took Alexander’s side against his own unfortunate kinsman. On 21 September 1494 he wrote to Orsino, clearly (since a draft in the Pope’s hand exists in the Vatican Secret Archives) at Alexander’s dictation. The letter has hitherto been attributed to Alexander but the terms in which it is written and the fact that it was to be sent from Monterotondo, the Orsini fortress outside Rome, makes it clear that the text was agreed between them during their conference in Rome, and that Orsini dispatched it from Monterotondo, Alexander keeping a draft for his archives.
In this letter Virginio informed Orsino that he had received news that the Duke of Calabria was angry because he had been told that Orsino was now recovered. ‘I therefore urge you for your honour and to purge your contumaciousness that you go immediately to the Duke of Calabria who I am sure will receive you kindly,’ he wrote, adding that he had hoped to find Adriana and Giulia ‘your mother and your wife’ in Rome so that he could encourage them not to abandon the Pope in this undertaking for the good of the King of Naples and his state and the benefit of the house of Orsini. He understood that the King had written to the same effect to Adriana: ‘And therefore it is necessary and thus we pray and command you that you should write immediately to Madama [Adriana] asking her and expressly ordering your wife that they should immediately come to Rome together and with all their skill and art to urge the Pope to remain firm in this enterprise . . .’ In view of the urgency of the matter he was sending his courier with the letter to await a reply confirming the orders Orsino would have given.39
The letter was almost certainly prompted by a report from Alexander’s confidant Francesco Gacet, which had roused the Pope to fury. He informed Alexander that Adriana had arrived at the Farnese estate of Capodimonte and had told Cardinal Farnese of Alexander’s recent resolution that Giulia should go to Rome and the archdeacon be sent to Orsino to persuade him to do the Pope’s will. Farnese (the future Pope Paul III), a proud and intelligent man who was well aware that he was known as ‘the petticoat cardinal’ because of his sister’s part in his promotion, stood firm against causing further scandal. He cared nothing for offending Orsino in order to do His Beatitude a service but he could not do this for his own honour and the infamy it would bring on his house. Gacet had suggested that Virginio Orsini should be prevailed upon to intervene and persuade Orsino to go to join the Neapolitan camp and after his departure the women could go to Rome. The cardinal, he stressed, would not for his honour resist Orsino’s demands that his wife should go to Bassanello. Fra Theseo, a monk in Giulia’s service, wrote from Bassanello warning her that he had never seen Orsino so enraged and that if she was wise she would under no circumstances go to Rome.40
Alexander was a man of unusual force of character, always determined to get his own way in all circumstances. He minuted three furious letters to Giulia, Adriana and Cardinal Farnese:
Ungrateful and perfidious Julia, we have received a letter of yours via Navarrico by which you declare that your intention is not to come here without the permission [against the will] of Ursino. And although at this moment we understand your wicked state of mind and that of those who counsel you, however, considering your feigned, dissimulating words can we totally persuade ourselves that you should use such ingratitude and perfidy towards us, having so many times sworn and pledged your faith to be at our command and not to concile yourself with Ursino. That now you want to do the contrary and go to Basanello [sic] with express peril to your life, I would not believe that you would do for any other reason if not to plunge again into that water of Bassanello . . . [a euphemism for resuming marital relations with Orsino which on a previous occasion resulted in the birth of their daughter, Laura].
He hoped that she and the ‘ingratissima’ Adriana would come to their senses and repent. Nonetheless, under pain of excommunication and sentence to eternal punishment he ordered her not to leave Capodimonte and still less to go to Bassanello.41
He wrote to Adriana along much the same lines, accusing her of revealing her wicked mind and malignity in declaring in her letter brought by Navarrico that she did not wish Giulia to go to Rome against the will of Orsino, and forbidding her to leave Capodimonte without his express permission.42 To Alessandro Farnese he wrote less venomously, reminding him of how much he, the Pope, had done for him and, with a note of trust betrayed, that he could have so soon preferred Orsino to him. Now, so that Farnese could excuse himself with Orsino and so that Giulia should not have to go to Bassanello, he, Alexander, would send him another papal brief in the hand of the Bishop of Nepi, exhorting and commanding him ‘to conform freely to our will’.43
But that was far from being the end of the matter: Alexander never gave up, as he informed Gacet. He had seen Fra Theseo’s letter to Giulia advising her to go to Bassanello and not to Rome (‘I know that friar,’ he added menacingly). He had responded by sending a brief to Orsino commanding him under threat of the gravest penalties either to go to the camp of the Duke of Calabria or to come to him in Rome within three days. Intimidated by all this pressure, Orsino capitulated, his brief stand for his honour evaporated: on 28 November he extracted his price, asking the Pope for money to pay his troops. On the 29th, Giulia, with her sister Girolama and Adriana, left Capodimonte for Rome. But they had left it too late and once again Alexander was – temporarily – thwarted in his desires. The party was captured near Viterbo by French troops under the gallant captain Yves d’Alègre and a demand for a ransom of 3,000 ducats was sent to the Pope. Alexander was frantic: he appealed to his former allies, Ascanio Sforza and Cardinal Sanseverino, to intercede for him with the King of France. His request was granted, and on I December the ladies arrived at the Vatican to be greeted by Juan Marrades, the Pope’s Catalan chamberlain. It was rumoured that Giulia spent the night there.
The ageing Pope’s passion and vanity were ridiculed by his many enemies, among them Ludovico Sforza. Giacomo Trotti, Ferrarese envoy at the court of Milan, reported Sforza’s reaction to Duke Ercole:
He gravely reproved Monsignor Ascanio and Cardinal Sanseverino for surrendering Madonna Giulia, Madonna Adriana, and Hieronyma [Girolama Farnese] to his Holiness: for, since these ladies were the ‘heart and eyes’ of the Pope, they would have been the best whip for compelling him to do everything which was wanted of him, for he could not live without them. The French, who captured them, received only three thousand ducats as ransom, although the Pope would gladly have paid fifty thousand or more simply to have them back again. The . . . Duke [Sforza] received news from Rome . . . that when the ladies entered, His Holiness went to meet them arrayed in a black doublet bordered with gold brocade, with a beautiful belt in the Spanish fashion, and with a sword and dagger. He wore Spanish boots and a velvet biretta, all very gallant. The Duke asked me, laughing, what I thought of it, and I told him that, were I the Duke of Milan, like him, I would endeavour, with the aid of the King of France and in every other way – and on the pretext of establishing peace – to entrap His Holiness, and with fair words, such as he himself was in the habit of using, to take him and the cardinals prisoners, which would be very easy. He who has the servant, as we say at home, has also the wagon and the oxen . . .44
Lucrezia, meanwhile, remained safely in Pesaro where life was pleasant enough in the princely palace in the main square and at the beautiful Villa Imperiale on the hill of San Bartolo above the city. Pesarese society, although less cosmopolitan than that of Rome, was far from being dull and provincial. It was, above all, secure: the French army, pouring southward without meeting any resistance, was intent on reaching Rome and taking Naples. In Rome, her father was isolated, supported only by Cesare. Juan was still in Spain, Jofre and Sancia in Naples. Alexander had been betrayed by the Orsini who handed their castle of Bracciano over to the French King, while the Neapolitan army had had to retreat south to defend the Kingdom. On 31 December, as Charles VIII entered Rome through the Porta del Popolo at the head of his troops, Alexander retreated through the covered way from the Vatican to the Castel Sant’Angelo, taking with him his private papers (including the letters quoted above) which were to reveal so much of his family relationships. The Borgias were at bay.