‘We have entrusted to our beloved daughter in Christ, the noble lady, Lucretia de Borgia, Duchess of Biseglia [sic], the office of keeper of the castle, as well as the government of our cities of Spoleto and Foligno, and of the county and district about them. Having perfect confidence in the intelligence, fidelity and probity of the Duchess . . . We trust that you will receive the Duchess Lucretia as is your duty, with all due honour as your regent, and show her submission in all things . . .’
– Alexander VI to the Priors of Spoleto, 18 August 1499
Alexander may have got what he wanted but the cost to Lucrezia’s reputation was high. Few believed that her marriage had not been consummated or that Giovanni Sforza was impotent, since his first wife had died in childbirth (his third wife would bear him two children). The idea that Lucrezia was a virgin, so necessary for her remarriage, was regarded as ludicrous. As Matarazzo, a Perugian chronicler unfavourable to the Borgias, put it: ‘[it was] a conclusion that set all Italy laughing . . . it was common knowledge that she had been and was then the greatest whore there ever was in Rome’. Sforza’s allegation that Alexander had taken Lucrezia from him to sleep with her himself became common currency. It may even be that he believed it. The closeness of the Borgias made the accusation of incest feasible; even Juan Gandia had been charged with sleeping with his sister. Both Alexander and Cesare loved Lucrezia deeply: in fact it seems that she was the only woman whom Cesare ever cared for.
Within months of the divorce Lucrezia was involved in further sexual scandal. On 14 February 1498, the body of Pedro Calderon, known as Perotto, a handsome young Spaniard who served in the Pope’s chamber, was discovered in the Tiber. According to Burchard who in his position as papal master of ceremonies was well up in palace gossip, on the night of the 8th Perotto ‘fell, not of his own will, into the Tiber . . . of which there is much said in the city’. And according to Marin Sanudo, the drowned body of Pantasilea, one of Lucrezia’s women, was found with him. It seems likely that Cesare had them both killed for reasons intimately connected with Lucrezia, who was almost certainly having an affair with Perotto. Knowledge of this affair may well have been a reason for her seclusion in San Sisto at a time when her divorce from Sforza was being planned by Alexander and Cesare in June the previous year. Shortly before the discovery of Perotto’s body in February 1498, Cristoforo Poggio, agent of the Bentivoglio family of Bologna, reported that Perotto had vanished mysteriously and was thought to be in prison ‘for having got His Holiness’s daughter, Lucrezia, with child’.1 In March 1498, a report by the Ferrarese envoy to Duke Ercole alleged that Lucrezia had given birth to a child. Since at that very moment negotiations for a second marriage for Lucrezia were going on, Cesare had every reason to remove any evidence of misconduct on his sister’s part by avenging himself on Perotto. Nothing and no one would be allowed to come in the way of his plans for Lucrezia which were so closely allied with his own.
The whole mysterious affair was complicated by the birth of a boy at around the same time. This was the notorious Giovanni Borgia, known as the ‘Infans Romanus’, who was certainly Alexander’s child. Although his paternity was at first attributed to Cesare, Alexander later admitted it in a secret Bull of September 1502. The timing of the birth, however, led people to believe that he was Lucrezia’s son, even, some said, fathered by the Pope. The fact that years later he was welcomed and well treated by the family of Lucrezia’s third husband where he was known as her half-brother, makes these rumours unlikely. What happened to Lucrezia’s child, if child there was – and the murders of Perotto and Pantasilea tend to support such a supposition – has never been revealed. It may, given Lucrezia’s later history of difficult pregnancies, have died at or soon after birth.
The craziness, cruelty and danger of Roman life was illustrated by an incident at that time, recorded meticulously by Burchard:
In these days was imprisoned Cursetta, a certain courtesan, that is honest prostitute, who had amongst her household a Moor who used to go about dressed as a woman, who called himself Barbara the Spaniard and knew her carnally in I know not what manner, and for this they were both led through the city in scandal, [Cursetta] dressed in black velvet to the ground but not bound, but the Moor, in female dress, with his upper arms tied behind his back, and the skirts of his dress and shift raised up to his navel, so that all could see his testicles and thus his fraud was clear. Having made a circle of the city, Cursetta was set free; the Moor was thrown into prison, and on Saturday the seventh of this month of April, he was led out with two robbers from the Torre di Nona, preceded by a constable mounted on an ass bearing a cane to which was tied the two testicles cut off from a Jew who had copulated with a Christian woman, and taken to the Campo di Fiore where the two thieves were hanged. The Moor was placed on top of a pyre and tied to the pillory, the cord round his neck was twisted strongly behind the column, and the faggots set alight, but they would not burn because of the heavy rain, but his legs at last were burnt being closest to the wood.
Burning at the stake was normally the punishment for sodomy or heresy (at the end of that month of April 1498, for example, the fanatical reforming friar Girolamo Savonarola died at the stake in Florence). The manner of the Moor’s death may have prompted Burchard’s curious phrase ‘[he] knew her carnally in I know not what manner’. On the same day six peasants were put in ‘the mitre’ (presumably the stocks) after having been whipped through the streets, for a particularly disgusting fraud: they had sold olive oil to syphilis sufferers with which to bathe themselves in the hope of a cure; afterwards the vendors had put the oil back in their pitchers and sold it to unsuspecting customers.
Alexander willingly received Jews expelled from Spain by his extreme Catholic ‘patroness’ Queen Isabella; he regarded them not only as useful citizens but as a potential source of revenue. Large sums of money would be required to fund the Borgias’ new plans for Cesare, and that summer there was a public conversion of three hundred Jews, or marrani, in the piazza of St Peter’s, a grand occasion witnessed by Lucrezia and Sancia,2 after which the ‘converts’ processed in scapulars marked with crosses to the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where they deposited them. Sanudo certainly saw this as yet another money-raising move by the Borgia Pope: ‘From letters I understand that the Pope ordered about 300 Spanish marrani dressed in yellow with a candle in the hand to proceed to Minerva . . . which was their public punishment. The secret one will be their money, as was done with the condemned Bishop of Calahorra [Pedro de Aranda, arrested and charged with heresy on 21 April 1498].’3 Other sources of funds were the estates of dead or disgraced churchmen: when the papal secretary Bartolomeu Flores, Archbishop of Cosenza, was arrested on the charge of forging papal briefs,4 Alexander confiscated his goods and his room in the Vatican with all its furniture and hangings which he gave to one of his confidants, Juan Marrades, and his archbishopric to another favourite, the chamberlain Jacopo Casanova. The Cardinal of Genoa died in March 1498: the Pope sent another of his Spanish chamberlains, Juan Ferrera, to take charge of his goods, and gave his archbishopric to a natural brother of Ascanio Sforza.
The archbishopric was probably the last favour the Sforza could expect from the Pope. Not only was Alexander contemplating a second marriage for Lucrezia into the Aragonese royal family of Naples, natural enemies of the Sforza, but on April Charles VIII of France died at Amboise, an event which presaged further danger for both the Sforza and the Aragonese. Charles’s successor, Louis XII, inherited not only Charles’s claims to Naples but, in his own right, a valid claim to the Duchy of Milan. What is more he wanted a dispensation from the Pope to put aside his wife, Jeanne de France, and to marry his predecessor’s widow, Anne de Bretagne, in order to keep Anne’s duchy of Brittany within the Kingdom of France. At that time the Pope and Cesare still saw their future with Naples but the needs and ambitions of the new French King would play a pivotal part in their policy.
That summer Alexander focused on Naples for his children’s marriages, negotiating with King Federigo to marry Lucrezia to Sancia’s brother, Alfonso, illegitimate son of the Duke of Calabria. His real goal, however, was to marry Cesare to Carlotta, the King’s legitimate daughter. To the Pope’s fury, Federigo made difficulties. Having obtained legitimization of his accession from the Borgias, he was far from eager to accommodate the Pope’s bastards with further marriages, money and lands in his Kingdom. Ascanio Sforza watched nervously from the sidelines as the Neapolitan negotiations proceeded. Early in May he reported the Pope’s anger with King Federigo’s negative attitude to the marriages.5 The King was not disposed to grant Alfonso a considerable estate and the Pope was enraged and humiliated at this slight, particularly since the affair had become public knowledge.6 Alexander’s reaction was to cover up by pretending that he intended to marry Lucrezia to Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina (who was to be executed by Cesare five years later).
He continued the pretence through the summer until, on 15 July, Alfonso arrived secretly in Rome. ‘This morning Don Alfonso arrived here,’ Ascanio reported to his brother, ‘and although he came as far as Marino with 50 horse, from Marino to here he brought only 6 or 7, as His Holiness wished for secrecy. He dined with me in the Palace [Vatican] then he went to meet His Holiness who greeted him very warmly; this evening he lodges in the house of the Princess his sister [Sancia] under guise of secrecy.’ In fact, Ascanio added, his arrival was widely known in Rome. The next day Cesare invited his future brother-in-law to his apartments with the most manifest display of affection and the following day the Pope welcomed him together with Lucrezia in the presence of Ascanio, the Cardinal of Perosa and Neapolitan representatives.
Finally, an agreement had been made between King Federigo and the Pope, whereby the King would give Alfonso the Duchy of Bisceglie and the lands of Corato as security for Lucrezia’s dowry,7 while the Pope would give her a dowry of 40,000 ducats.8 It was also agreed that Alfonso should stay in Rome for a year and that Lucrezia would not be obliged to go to Naples.
Once again Lucrezia was a political pawn: her marriage to Alfonso was simply a stepping stone to the more important marriage of Cesare to Carlotta of Naples, which would give him a foothold in the Kingdom. Within a comparatively short time her connection with Bisceglie, like her marriage to Giovanni Sforza, would be surplus to her family’s requirements. She appeared happy, however, with her chosen husband, a goodlooking youth of seventeen. The marriage took place in private on 21 July in the presence of cardinals Ascanio Sforza, Juan Lopez and Juan Borgia. In accordance with custom a naked sword was held over the couple by Juan Cervillon, the Catalan captain of the papal guard, but the celebrations were held behind closed doors. Burchard, who would have been in charge of the ceremonies had they been public, recorded only that Alfonso contracted marriage with Lucrezia in the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico ‘and then carnally consummated the marriage’.
However, there was an insider account. The celebrations enjoyed in the Vatican with huge exuberance by the Borgia inner circle were described in detail by Sancia, sister of the bridegroom, and now known to be Cesare’s mistress. On Sunday 5 August a solemn nuptial mass was held in the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico, with the couple flanked by Sancia and Jofre. Sancia described Lucrezia’s magnificent dress at length; this stress on the richness of clothes and costly materials is a feature in every account of a period which laid such importance on bella figura, the display of beauty and wealth being considered an essential indication of the rank and importance of the person. Lucrezia’s robes included a rich silken skirt of camlet with sleeves studded with jewels and a long robe in the French style of golden brocade with a pattern of black thread and crimson velvet trim; her belt was studded with pearls and other jewels, she wore a necklace of large, fine pearls round her neck, her ‘very beautiful’ hair hung down over her shoulders, and on her head she wore a cap embroidered with jewels and pearls and a band of gold wrought and enamelled. Alfonso was also splendidly dressed in black brocade lined with crimson satin; he wore a cap of black velvet with a brooch given him by Lucrezia: a gold medallion with a unicorn as a device and a jewelled golden cherub. Lucrezia was attended by three ladies, and by Geronima Borgia, sister of the cardinal, and her household all splendidly dressed.
The company remained in the palace all day and feasted there until, at the twenty-third hour, the Pope sent his courtiers to escort them to a hall in the Vatican, known as the Room of the Pontiffs, where, with the Pope enthroned and with Lucrezia, Alfonso, Sancia and Jofre at his feet, the order was given for the ladies and gentlemen to dance. At Alexander’s command Lucrezia first danced alone and then with Alfonso. Afterwards they dined, with the Pope by himself at a high table, and at another Lucrezia, Alfonso, the cardinals Borgia and Perusa, the protonotary Capellan and Geronima Borgia. Sancia was given the signal honour of serving the Pope wine. Then the cardinals Borgia of Monreale and Perusa, with Don Alfonso, served the Pope’s table before themselves sitting down to eat. The highest ranking courtiers acted as pages and after dining, which took three hours, the Pope presented Lucrezia with a magnificent silver service and the cardinals followed suit with gifts of silver and jewels. After this the Pope and his party withdrew to the Borgia Apartments where Cesare had set up magnificent tableaux – a fountain richly worked with depictions of cobras and other poisonous snakes, while in another room there was a wood in which wandered seven mummers dressed as animals: Jofre, quaintly, as a sea goose; the prior of Santa Eufemia (Ludovico Borgia), brother of Cardinal Borgia, as an elephant; and other gentlemen of Cesare’s dressed as a fox, a stag, a lion and a giraffe. Cesare himself appeared as a unicorn. They were all dressed in satin according to the colour of the animal they represented and came in one by one, dancing before the Pope. At last Cesare asked permission to dance with Lucrezia, after which each of the mummers danced with the ladies. And so it continued until dawn was breaking when they had a collation served as before, and at sunrise the Pope ordered Lucrezia and Alfonso home, attended by all the company except Cesare, who remained with his father.
That day, Monday 6 August, was spent sleeping and on the Tuesday Cesare gave a party in the great loggia of the Villa Belvedere in the Vatican gardens (built by Pope Innocent VIII and decorated with frescoes by Mantegna). Cesare, seated beside Alexander, wore lay dress, splendid in a doublet of crimson satin and white brocade in the French style, white buskins or half-boots, a cape and a bonnet of black velvet with golden tassels and a white plume, adorned with a gold medallion showing a woman’s head. Lucrezia, Cesare and Sancia danced together, then the others danced and at one hour of the night they brought in the table for supper. Cesare, who had changed his clothes once again, acted as master of ceremonies to the Pope while the principal men of his household carried out the service of the table. Others acted as pages bearing flaming torches, including Cesare’s henchman, the sinister Don Miguel de Corella. Afterwards the company watched ‘some buffoons who performed many tricks’. Then Cesare danced another dance with Lucrezia, and another eight with Sancia; then the Pope ordered Cesare, Lucrezia and Sancia to dance together, followed by general dancing, after which the company retired to rest. At sunrise the Pope got up and went to the loggia where they were all served with a collation of sweetmeats, with Cesare again acting as master of ceremonies. There were one hundred dishes of sweetmeats and conserves. Then came ‘diverse and very beautiful inventions’—sugar statues presented by Cesare with diverse motifs. One placed before the Pope was in the figure of a woman with an apple in her hand signifying his mastery of the world; for Alfonso there was a cupid with verses in his hand; for Lucrezia a woman supposed to be the Roman matron Lucretia; for Cesare – significantly – a knight with arms given to him by the goddess of battles. Jofre was given a statue of a sleeping man, possibly a teasing reference to his role as his brother’s cuckold; and Sancia, less suitably, a unicorn, the symbol of chastity. At the end of the collation the Pope sent Alfonso, Lucrezia and the others to their lodgings once more, at which point he again retired to his own rooms with Cesare.
That was not the end of the Borgia celebrations masterminded by Cesare and in which he played the dominant role. On 12 August, the following Sunday, in the park of Cardinal Ascanio’s villa, he organized a bullfight; attended by ten thousand spectators, its most notable feature was a magnificently decorated platform draped with tapestries and lengths of silk for the guests of honour, Lucrezia and Alfonso, Sancia and Jofre and their retinues. Cesare appeared on the field on foot with twelve knights: his clothes (some of which she had presented to him that day) excited Sancia’s admiration so much that in her record of events she even included a description of his horse, a white Barbary steed, with its jewel-studded harness and white brocade caparison the most beautiful she had ever seen. In one hand Cesare carried a fine lance worked in silver and gold which Sancia had also given him that day, and in the other held the reins of eight fine horses equally beautifully caparisoned. Two mounted pages holding lances bearing banners embroidered with a golden sun accompanied him, and he was preceded by twelve boys dressed in his livery of yellow satin halved with carmine, and twelve horsemen all wearing livery given to them by Cesare. In the course of the afternoon Cesare killed all the bulls. The party then feasted and the horsemen held races until nightfall when the party rode to Sancia’s palace where they supped and passed six more hours in ‘singing and other pleasures’.9
But even as Lucrezia and Alfonso exuberantly celebrated their wedding, the tide was already turning. Cesare’s ambitions and Alexander’s international policies had taken a new turn that summer. Since the death of Charles VIII, it had become obvious that there would be a conflict in Italy between Ferdinand of Aragon and Louis of France. This time Alexander saw more advantage to be drawn from the French King than from his old patron, Ferdinand. Ferdinand had placed obstacles in the way of Alexander’s plans for Cesare: supporting King Federigo of Naples in his refusal to give Cesare his legitimate daughter, Carlotta; opposing Cesare’s intention to give up his cardinalate so that he could pursue his secular ambitions; and refusing to allow the late Juan Gandia’s lands in Valencia to pass to Cesare. France, on the other hand, offered to accommodate Alexander in every way in order to obtain the dissolution of Louis’s marriage with Jeanne de France and a dispensation enabling him to marry his predecessor’s widow, Anne de Bretagne. Late that summer a secret agreement was signed between King and Pope, by which Louis promised to support Cesare’s marriage to Carlotta of Aragon (who was at the French court at the time), to give him the counties of Valence and Diois, the former to be raised to a duchy, with revenues of 20,000 gold francs, the financing by Louis of a large force of nearly two thousand heavy cavalry to operate on Cesare’s orders in Italy or elsewhere, a personal subsidy to Cesare of 20,000 gold francs per annum, the lordship of Asti for Cesare upon the French conquest of Milan, and finally his investiture of France’s highest honour, the Order of St Michel.
On 17 August 1498, Cesare put off his cardinal’s robes.A magnificently wrought parade sword he had had made earlier that summer symbolized his new personal ambitions for it was decorated with scenes from the life of Julius Caesar with whom Cesare identified. Cesare, who always signed himself ‘Cesar’, the Spanish form of his name and the one closest to the Roman original, was later to adopt as his motto ‘Aut Caesar aut nihil’: ‘Either Caesar or nothing’. That same day Louis’s envoy, Baron de Trans, arrived in Rome bearing the letters patent that would entitle the former Cardinal of Valencia to call himself duc de Valentinois. For Italians, the two foreign titles sounded almost the same: Valencia became ‘il Valentino’. There was general outrage at the blatant cynicism of the Borgias: Cesare had made his announcement to a sparse audience on 17 August, even the Spanish cardinals having thought it prudent to be out of Rome. Relentlessly Alexander rounded them up: five days later, at another consistory, he obtained all the cardinals’ votes. Cesare’s power in Rome had already been recognized – ‘he has the Pope in his fist’, an envoy had written two years before. Cesare held not just the Pope but the Pope’s castellans in Rome and the surrounding territories in an iron grip.
His departure for France on I October was yet another public demonstration of Borgia power and splendour paid for by 200,000 ducats, raised, it was said, from the confiscation of the goods of Pedro de Aranda, Bishop of Calahorra, lately condemned for heresy, and from the three hundred Jews whose conversion Lucrezia had earlier witnessed in the piazza of St Peter’s. Roman supplies of rich stuffs, jewels, gold and silverware had been exhausted so that additional luxuries had to be brought in from Venice and elsewhere. Cesare had requested Francesco Gonzaga and Ippolito d’Este to send him horses ‘not unworthy of French esteem’ from their famous stables. These coursers were to be shod with silver; Cesare even took with him a princely travelling privy ‘covered with gold brocade without and scarlet within, with silver vessels within the urinals’. No expense was spared in an effort to impress the French and perhaps some of it was intended to offset the discomfort Cesare felt at his appearance. For the blotches under the skin associated with the second stage of syphilis now showed on his handsome face. The significance of his departure for France on a French ship, destined for a military career, was not lost on the watching envoys of the Italian powers. As the Mantuan Cattaneo wrote with wry foreboding: ‘The ruin of Italy is confirmed . . . given the plans which father and son have made but many believe the Holy Spirit has no part in them . . .’ Nor would the Holy Spirit have any part in Cesare’s plans for Lucrezia, still happy and content in the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico with her new young husband.
That autumn after Cesare’s departure, Lucrezia was first in her father’s attentions, courted particularly by Ascanio Sforza who was anxiously aware of which way the Pope’s alliances were inclining. On 23 October, Sanudo reported that Ascanio was in Rome, though not invited to the Vatican by the Pope, but that he ‘has been with the daughter of the Pontiff and attends to nothing else’.10 At the end of the year, a confidant of Ludovico reported that Lucrezia, with the cardinals of Capua and Borgia, were the three people of influence with the Pope.11 On the surface, all had seemed well; at a ceremony in the Vatican, Paolo Orsini’s son, Fabio, married Geronima Borgia, sister of Cardinal Juan Borgia the younger, on 8 September, when Lucrezia’s husband held the naked sword over the couple.
But even Lucrezia, now pregnant with her first child by Alfonso, could not avert the shadows gathering around him. In late December ambassadors arrived from Spain for a stormy four-hour interview with Alexander during which they complained of his negotiations with the French, returned to the old charges of simony concerning his election to the papacy and threatened a Council of the Church to depose him. They tactlessly raised the death of Gandia as God’s punishment for his sins – to which Alexander angrily retorted that God had also punished the Spanish sovereigns with the death of their son.12 They reminded him of his pledge (made in the immediate aftermath of Gandia’s murder) to reform the papacy and send away his children. This Alexander steadfastly refused to consider: during another fierce row with the envoys in the Sala del Pappagallo the following month in the presence of six cardinals, when they petitioned him to recall Cesare from France and restore him to the cardinalate, Alexander, according to Sanudo, threatened to throw them into the Tiber.
In February, Lucrezia suffered a miscarriage. Running down a hill in a ‘vineyard’ on a beautiful Roman spring day she fell, and the lady following her fell on top of her, as a result of which she lost a baby girl. She was soon pregnant again but politics – and Cesare – would make a settled life with her husband impossible. On 23 May a special courier arrived in Rome with the news that Cesare had contracted – and consummated – marriage, not with Carlotta of Aragon, who had resolutely refused to consider it, but with a cousin of the French King, the sister of the King of Navarre. Charlotte d’Albret, three years younger than Lucrezia, was an acknowledged beauty – even the critical Italian envoys called her ‘the loveliest daughter of France’. King Louis reassured the Pope that the marriage had been consummated, Cesare’s performance in bed even surpassing his own wedding night with Anne de Bretagne: ‘Valencia has broken four lances more than he, two before supper and six at night,’ reported Cattaneo after all the letters from France had been read out on the orders of the delighted Pope. Alexander – and the Spanish, Milanese and Neapolitan party – had been on tenterhooks as to the outcome of Cesare’s French adventure. The result spelled danger for the dynasties of Sforza and the Aragonese of Naples.
To celebrate her brother’s marriage Lucrezia lit a fire outside her palace but it is unlikely that her jubilation was shared by her husband or her sister-in-law. It was not long before the outcome became clear: as commander of a squadron of heavy cavalry Cesare was to accompany Louis to Italy. By mid July as the news filtered through to Italy, the casualties of the Borgias’ pro-French policy fled Rome. Ascanio was the first to go, leaving precipitately on 13 July for the Colonna stronghold at Nettuno. A week later Ludovico captured one of Cesare’s servants en route from Rome to Lyons with secret letters from the Pope. Ascanio immediately fled Nettuno for Milan to join his brother. On Friday 2 August Alfonso, now, as the chronicler put it, ‘an unwelcome guest’, ‘secretly left the city before daybreak . . . to go to the lands of the Colonna and thence to the Kingdom of Naples without the licence, knowledge or will of the Pontiff’. He left Lucrezia six months pregnant and in tears. There seems to be little doubt that they loved each other: from Genazzano, Alfonso wrote to her begging her to join him. He should have known the Vatican intelligence system better: the letters fell into the Pope’s hands and Alexander forced Lucrezia to write back asking him to return. For greater security, the Pope sent Lucrezia out of Rome to act as Governor of Spoleto. Lucrezia was only nineteen but her appointment was far from being a cynical joke; later in life she was to demonstrate that she had inherited her father’s administrative ability. With Cesare in France, Alexander regarded her as the only one whose ability and loyalty he could trust: Jofre had been placed in the Castel Sant’Angelo after incurring his father’s wrath for involving himself with the city police in a brawl in which he had been wounded. Alexander’s anger had extended to Sancia when the fiery princess defended Jofre. As a potential spy in the Vatican, she was dispatched to Naples in Alfonso’s wake.
Lucrezia’s appointment as Governor of Spoleto was intended to demonstrate a Borgia presence in the Papal States north of Rome and to provide Lucrezia with an independent power base with rich revenues. Jofre, who accompanied his sister as she left the city, was clearly considered inadequate to fulfil that role. Alexander made his trust in Lucrezia plain in a letter he wrote to the Priors of Spoleto:
We have entrusted to our beloved daughter in Christ, the noble lady, Lucretia de Borgia, Duchess of Biseglia [sic], the office of keeper of the castle, as well as the government of our cities of Spoleto and Foligno, and of the county and district about them. Having perfect confidence in the intelligence, fidelity and probity of the Duchess, which We have dwelt upon in previous letters . . . We trust that you will receive the Duchess Lucretia as is your duty, with all due honour as your regent, and show her submission in all things . . . collectively and severally, in so far as law and custom dictate in the government of the city, and whatever she may think proper to exact of you, even as you would obey Ourselves, and to execute her commands with all diligence and promptness.13
Lucrezia arrived in the great castle of Spoleto with a train of forty-three carriages loaded with goods designed to display her gubernatorial magnificence. Meanwhile Alexander, perhaps in fulfilment of a promise he had made to her before she left Rome, sent Juan Cervillon, one of the Borgias’ most trusted henchmen, to Naples to persuade the King to send Alfonso back. ‘And they will have a hundred matters to discuss, each seeking to fool the other,’ the Mantuan envoy reported,14 ‘but the Pope will not trust the King, nor the King the Pope.’ There was a mysterious killing in Rome of a Spanish constable of the guard, one of Cesare’s most favoured followers who had been ‘involved with him in many matters’. He was found drowned with a cord round his neck, his hands tied, in a sack weighted with a stone. The body was meant to be found, as it had been attached to posts in a vineyard on the river bank, probably as a warning to the Borgias and to Cesare, now in Lyons with the French army destined for Italy, that they had powerful enemies. The Mantuan envoy, always ready to embroider a crime or a mystery, added ‘it is presumed he knew too much’.15
King Federigo, however, perhaps unwilling to offend the Pope in these critical times, now agreed to send Alfonso back to Lucrezia. Avoiding Rome, the young man was reunited in Spoleto with his now heavily pregnant wife. With Jofre they joined Alexander on 25 September at the powerful fortress of Nepi, strategically situated between the two main roads, the Via Cassia and the Via Flaminia. Alexander had taken the castle from the absent Ascanio Sforza and fortified it; he now handed it over to Lucrezia, together with the city and its lands. Lucrezia was now mistress of two key castles and territories in the Papal States north of Rome, but she did not stay there long. On 14 October she returned to Rome with Alfonso and Jofre to be greeted by, among others, mummers and jesters of the Pope’s household. Nearing her time, she retreated to her Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico. The Vatican was crowded with armed men and there was a palpable air of excitement and fear. On 11 October, Louis XII had entered Milan in triumph and splendour; riding close behind him was Cardinal Borgia, and two ranks behind him Cesare with Duke Ercole d’Este, followed by the Marquis of Mantua. A few days later, the Pope deprived the Malatesta lords of Rimini, the Riarii of Imola and Forlì, Varani of Camerino, Manfredi of Faenza, and Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, of their status as papal vicars on the grounds of non-payment of the census. Among them was Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro. The way was now open for a Borgia takeover of a large portion of the Papal States, the Romagna and the Marches, by Cesare acting in the name of the Church, backed by French troops and a loan of 45,000 ducats from the Commune of Milan, guaranteed by cardinals Borgia and Giuliano della Rovere.
On 1 November, Lucrezia gave birth to a son, named Rodrigo in honour of her father. He was christened in St Peter’s on the 11th, St Martin’s Day, amid great pomp. The entrance to Lucrezia’s palace was hung with silks and brocade. As a mark of great favour, Juan Cervillon carried the baby, who was dressed in a robe of gold brocade trimmed with ermine, into the basilica to the sound of trumpets and oboes. The child was attended by the ambassadors of the Empire, England, Naples, Venice, Savoy and Florence. He was delivered by Francesco Borgia, Cardinal of Cosenza, to be baptized in the great silver gilt shell, commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV, by Cardinal Caraffa, who stood as his godfather. Underlining the reconciliation between Orsini and Borgia, Paolo Orsini carried the child back to Santa Maria in Portico. Startled by the noise of the trumpets the baby Rodrigo, who had been silent during the whole ceremony, began to cry.
As yet, the baby’s father, Alfonso, had no reason to feel insecure, protected as he was by the high favour in which Lucrezia was held by the Pope. As of that moment, Cesare’s attention was turned on the Romagna where, with Louis’s political and military support, he anticipated an easy campaign. Almost without exception, the lords of the Romagna were a worthless lot, detested by their subjects, whom they shamelessly exploited. As Machiavelli later wrote in the Discourses: ‘Before those lords who ruled it were driven out by Pope Alexander VI, the Romagna was a nursery of the worst crimes, the slightest occasion giving rise to wholesale rapine and murder. This resulted from the wickedness of these lords, and not, as they asserted, from the disposition of their subjects. For these princes being poor, yet choosing to live as if they were rich, were forced to resort to cruelties innumerable . . .’
For Cesare, as for Alexander, politics was the art of the possible: a Venetian report of a mission by Cardinal Borgia on Cesare’s behalf illustrates his thinking: ‘. . . he did not want Ferrara since it was a great state, and its lord old and loved by the people, and has three sons who would never leave him in peace if he had it; however he wanted Imola, Forlì and Pesaro, an undertaking which would be easy . . .’
Even before he reached Forlì, Cesare was forced to make a secret dash to Rome on 18 November. The ruler of Forlì, Caterina Sforza Riario, a famous beauty who was also a warlike ‘virago’, had attempted to pre-empt Cesare’s attack by poisoning the Pope. That afternoon Cardinal Riario suddenly left Rome on the pretext of going hunting and did not return, while Burchard revealed that one of Jofre Borgia’s musicians, a native of Forlì, and an accomplice, had been taken to the Castel Sant’Angelo because they had planned to murder the Pope by means of letters steeped in poison which they intended to present to Alexander under the guise of a petition. Another version had Caterina Sforza wrapping the letters in a cloth taken from the body of a plague victim. It was a vain attempt and Cesare rode north again three days later to continue his campaign; Caterina’s cities gave themselves to him ‘like whores’, as Sanudo put it. Only Caterina in the citadel of Forlì held out.
While Cesare was campaigning in the Romagna, Lucrezia was shocked by the murder in mid December of another Borgia intimate —Juan Cervillon, the man who had carried the infant Rodrigo to his baptism the previous month. As with so many crimes at the time, his death was imputed to Cesare but, as Burchard recorded, he had ‘many enemies’ and the murder could have been carried out by any of them. Cesare was, in fact, the least likely candidate.
Lucrezia’s life in Rome at this time remains a mystery. While her father and brother were intent on their complicated plans for Cesare’s advancement, she is barely mentioned. She is recorded as having ridden to the Lateran in procession with Alfonso and one hundred horsemen, including Giulia Farnese’s husband, Orsino Orsini, as a part of the celebrations of the Holy Year of 1500 inaugurated by Alexander on 24 December. But she remained a part of Alexander’s plans for the family, this time at the expense of the Caetani family whose lands at Sermoneta and other territories south of Rome he expropriated from the head of the clan, Guglielmo Caetani, who happened to be Giulia Farnese’s uncle. In February 1500 Lucrezia became ruler of Sermoneta in addition to her lands north of Rome. Five months later Guglielmo Caetani died of poison. Did Lucrezia close her eyes to the terrible things which were taking place? Probably. Did she protest? Almost certainly not. It was only when the atmosphere of violence touched her own circle that she finally rebelled against the ruthlessness of her father and brother.
As before, Lucrezia’s fate and that of those close to her was closely bound up with Cesare’s plans and ambitions. Cesare had returned to Rome in triumph in the last week of February, his arrival a carefully stage-managed spectacle which galvanized the city, already full of pilgrims and foreign visitors enjoying the spiritual and other less worthy benefits of Holy Year. Even before the appearance of the principal character, the event compared favourably with the excitement of a Roman triumph. Down the wide Via Lata (now the Corso) from the Porta del Popolo marched the city dignitaries and officials of the Vatican Curia in their finest robes, the cardinals riding in purple and ermine, with their households in rich livery, and the ambassadors from every country in the Christian world with their retinues. The organization of the procession outside the Porta del Popolo had driven the everprecise papal master of ceremonies, Burchard, almost to despair. People had joined the company from every village it had passed through, forming a disorderly group with no more regard for papal protocol than Cesare’s Swiss and Gascon mercenaries. These, in five companies under standards bearing his arms, refused to acknowledge Burchard’s authority and ‘indecently’ occupied places in the procession to which they were not entitled. The more orderly part of the official entry comprised Cesare’s baggage wagons, the mules caparisoned in his colours of crimson and gold, then two heralds, one in the colours of France, the other in Cesare’s livery, then one thousand infantry in full campaign armour, and a hundred of his personal guard with ‘Cesar’ emblazoned in silver letters on their chests. Fifty gorgeously dressed gentlemen of his household preceded the cavalry headed by Vitellozzo Vitelli, a renowned condottiere. Then came Cesare himself, flanked by cardinals Orsini and Farnese and followed by Alfonso Bisceglie and Jofre.
Cesare wore a simple robe of black velvet, his only ornament the golden collar of the Order of St Michel, the symbol of his new high rank. The stark cloth set off his looks more dramatically than the flashy silks he had worn on his departure for France almost eighteen months before. From now on, with a growing confidence in himself, black, with its connotations of outward drama, inner narcissism and introversion, was to be his preferred colour, a reflection of his increasingly dark personality.
Alexander was beside himself with paternal pride. At Cesare’s reception in the Sala del Pappagallo ambassadors recorded him as so moved that he cried at one moment and laughed the next. He embraced Cesare tenderly and even welcomed his son’s captive, Caterina Sforza, the woman who had tried to have him poisoned, and lodged her comfortably in the Vatican. (When she refused to sign away her rights and those of her children to Imola and Forli, she was moved to less agreeable quarters in the prisons of the Castel Sant’Angelo.) When, the next day, Cesare staged an allegorical procession representing the Triumphs of Caesar, the Pope was so delighted with it that he insisted it pass twice before his windows. On 29 March he gave Cesare the Golden Rose and invested him with the insignia of Gonfalonier and Captain General of the Church. To the watchful envoys, this nomination could signify only one thing – a complete Borgia takeover of the Church. With the father wielding the spiritual and temporal authority of the papacy, the son in control of the papal forces and the beginnings of a Borgia state taking place in the Romagna, the future was pregnant with potential danger.
The Borgias’ plans were put into a temporary state of suspension by the brief return on 5 February 1500 of Ludovico to Milan and the defeat of the French in Lombardy; without the help of the French, Cesare was not yet strong enough to pursue his conquest of the Romagna. But on 10 April, il Moro was decisively defeated by the French at Novara, taken prisoner and immured in the fortress of Loches in Touraine, where he died eight years later. It was a sad end for the once magnificent Duke of Milan, born for his own ruin as much as that of his country. Leonardo da Vinci recorded in his notebook an epitaph on his former patron: ‘The Duke has lost fortune, state and liberty, and not one of his works has been completed.’ The news was greeted with cries of ‘Urso [Orsini]’ and ‘Francia’ by the many Orsini partisans in the city and fires were lit outside the Orsini palace of Montegiordano and in the piazza outside the Pantheon. Ascanio was also captured and imprisoned in Bourges. The Pope, who had given 100 ducats to the messenger who had brought the news of Ludovico’s downfall, rewarded with the same sum the tidings of the downfall of Ascanio, his old ally. According to Burchard:
The Pope has had from him [Ascanio] very pitiful, plaintive letters, in which he recounts how he has lost in three days, his brother, his State, his honour, his possessions and the liberty of his person, beseeching His Holiness that, in whatever manner it may seem best to him, he should deign to consider his liberation, signing himself: infelix et afflictus Ascanius [‘unhappy and afflicted Ascanio’]. The College [of Cardinals] has discussed it, and the Pope keeps the matter to himself, and shows himself well content with this matter or not, according to the person with whom he is speaking: moreover he shows no compassion . . .
Far from showing compassion, Alexander immediately took advantage of Ascanio’s misfortune, seizing his art treasures and giving away his benefices to new allies, such as Giuliano della Rovere.16
With the Sforzas out of the way, the Borgias’ hopes rested with France and Louis XII who, having regained his Milanese duchy, now looked to assert his rights to his Neapolitan kingdom. In this event, the Aragonese, including Alfonso Bisceglie, would be swept away just as the Sforzas had been. A decision handed down by Alexander at the beginning of April had indicated which way the wind was blowing when he gave sentence against Alfonso’s relation, Beatrice d’Aragona, Queen of Hungary, daughter of King Ferrante, whose husband, Ladislaus Jagiello, had repudiated her, asking for an annulment. The line-up of the powers in this case was significant: the Emperor, the Kings of Spain and Naples and the Milanese interest supported her; the French and Venice took the opposite side. Alfonso Bisceglie complained bitterly of the Pope’s decision, as Antonio Malegonelle reported to the Signoria of Florence: ‘It seems to me of great significance this sentence against the Queen of Hungary, concerning which sentence as it happens, I being in the Camera del Pappagallo, heard the Duke of Bisceglie condoling greatly with the Ambassador of Naples, not noticing that I overheard him . . .17
Alfonso’s sister Sancia made her feelings clear when a Burgundian and a Frenchman quarrelled over a banner and the Burgundian challenged the Frenchman to a duel. When Cesare heard of it, he offered the Burgundian 20 ducats, brocade clothes and a new banner if he would give up the fight. The Burgundian refused and won the duel, which took place on 9 April. As a gesture of defiance to Cesare, Sancia had dressed twelve of her squires in livery bearing the cross of St Andrew in honour of the Burgundian. ‘It was said,’ Burchard wrote, ‘that he [Cesare] would rather have lost 20,000 ducats than see the Frenchman beaten.’ The affair between Cesare and Sancia was long over: that summer he took up with a beautiful, rich and intelligent courtesan, the Florentine Fiammetta de’Michelis. Fiammetta owned three houses in the city, including one on the piazza named after her near the Piazza Navona, and a country villa, or vigna. She was typical of the high-class courtesans of her time who liked to show off their intellectual abilities. Fiammetta spoke Latin, declaimed Ovid and Petrarch from memory and sang delightfully, accompanying herself on the lyre. Her relationship with Cesare was so well known that her will in the city archives was headed ‘The Testament of la Fiammetta of il Valentino’. Lucrezia, however, sided with the husband she loved and with his sister. She was not prepared to change her loyalties to follow her father and elder brother and, conscious of her father’s continuing favour, was confident of her power to protect Alfonso.
At the end of June 1500 the Borgia party in Rome was shaken by the Pope’s near fatal accident when a whirlwind struck the Vatican, causing the roof of the Sala dei Papi where he was sitting to fall in. The Sienese banker Lorenzo Chigi, with whom he was conversing, was killed outright; the Cardinal of Capua and Gaspar Poto, the Pope’s secret chamberlain who were in the room, saved themselves by standing in the window niches. Alexander escaped death only because the canopy over the papal throne protected him, but he was struck on the head and rendered unconscious. In his apartment beneath, Cesare had left the room shortly beforehand, but three people who had been there with him died. Rumours spread that the Pope was dead and armed men crowded the Vatican but despite being bled of thirteen ounces of blood, Alexander recovered quickly. Sanudo, the first outsider to visit him following his accident, found him in the bosom of his family – Lucrezia, Sancia, Cesare and Jofre. If Alfonso Bisceglie was there, the diarist did not mention him; he did, however, record that one of Lucrezia’s ladies, ‘the Pope’s favourite’, was at the seventy-year-old pontiff’s bedside.18 The young Borgias realized only too well how their fortunes depended on the Pope’s life. Despite his tremendous vitality, Alexander was subject to fainting fits and fevers which suggest high blood pressure, bad enough to be public knowledge among Vatican observers.
Just over two weeks later, on Wednesday 15 July, Alfonso Bisceglie was attacked on the steps of St Peter’s by ‘persons unknown’. Francesco Cappello reported to Florence the next day:
Yesterday evening at three hours of the night [he] left the Palace and was going to his house which is beside St Peter’s on the Piazza, and being on the steps of St Peter’s, under the balcony of the Benediction, accompanied by only two of his grooms because he was unsuspecting, four men attacked him very well armed and dealt him three blows: one on the head, very deep; and one across the shoulder, either one of which could be mortal: and another small one on the arm: and by what is known the wounds are of a gravity that he will be in need of God’s help: and this evening now they have examined his wounds, they say he is very ill. Who may have wounded him, no one says, and it is not obvious that diligent inquiries are being made as they should be, nor is it much spoken of. Indeed around Rome it is rumoured that these things are amongst their very selves, because in that Palace there are so many hatreds both old and new, and so much envy and jealousy both for reasons of State and others, that it is necessary often to hide similar scandals. It is said that the wounded duke was taken back into the Palace, and the Pope got up and went to see him, and Madonna Lucrezia was in a dead faint.19
According to Burchard, the attackers then fled by the steps of St Peter’s to where around forty horsemen awaited them, with whom they rode out through the Porta Pertusa. Cattaneo wrote to Isabella d’Este that the assailants were dragging Alfonso away, possibly to throw him in the river, when they were surprised by the guards. According to him, the Pope was distressed and had his wounded son-in-law carried up thirty steps to apartments above his own. Three days later Lucrezia was reported as ill of a fever because of her anguish.
Once again, as in the case of Gandia, the attack on Bisceglie, ‘a lord who was nephew of a late king, son of a present king and son-in-law of the Pope’, was said to have been ordered by someone very powerful – ‘someone with more power than him’.20 Sanudo reported, ‘it is not known who wounded the said Duke, but it is said that it was whoever killed and threw into the Tiber the Duke of Gandia . . .’21 Fear now ruled the city: Cesare issued an edict forbidding the carrying of arms in the Borgo between Sant’Angelo and St Peter’s. Suspicion was rife but people dared not name names. Alfonso’s former tutor, Raphael Brandolinus Lippi, who received a stipend from the papal court, wrote to Ferrara on the day following the attack: ‘Whose was the hand behind the assassins is still unknown. I will not, however, repeat which names are being voiced, because it is grave and perilous to entrust it to a letter.’
One name, however, was being voiced within twenty-four hours of the attempt on Bisceglie – that of Cesare. On 16 July, Vincenzo Calmeta, poet and papal secretary, wrote his former patroness, the Duchess of Urbino, a detailed account of it, ending: ‘Who may have ordered this thing to be done, everyone thinks to be the Duke Valentino.’ Alfonso’s wounds should not prove fatal, he said, adding significantly, ‘if some new accident does not intervene’. Others saw the hand of the Orsini in the affair, since Alfonso was in league with the pro-Neapolitan Colonna. Although the Orsini were the most likely authors, or rather bunglers, of the assassination attempt, it is feasible to consider that Cesare might have had foreknowledge of it – he had his own reasons for wishing his brother-in-law out of the way – and he, rather than the Orsini, would have had intimate information as to Alfonso’s movements. He is reported to have said: ‘I did not wound the Duke, but if I had, it would have been no more than he deserved.’ The one factor which might be seen to exculpate him from the actual planning of the attack was the bungling of its execution: his own henchmen never failed to carry out his orders, as events were soon to show.
Lucrezia and, apparently Alexander, were taking no chances. Only the doctor sent by the King of Naples was allowed to attend Alfonso while Lucrezia prepared his food herself for fear of poison. On 18 August, almost exactly a month after the attack, Alfonso, much recovered, was sitting up in his bed in his room in the Torre Borgia, talking and laughing with his wife, his sister, his uncle and the envoy, when sudden violence erupted. According to Brandolinus:
. . . there burst into the chamber Michelotto [Miguel da Corella] most sinister minister of Cesare Valentino; he seized by force Alfonso’s uncle and the royal envoy [of Naples], and having bound their hands behind their backs, consigned them to armed men who stood behind the door, to lead them to prison. Lucrezia, Alfonso’s wife, and Sancia, his sister, stupefied by the suddenness and violence of the act, shrieked at Michelotto, demanding how he dared commit such an offence before their very eyes and in the presence of Alfonso. He excused himself as persuasively as he could, declaring that he was obeying the will of others, that he had to live by the orders of another, but that they, if they wished, might go to the Pope, and it would be easy to obtain the release of the arrested men. Carried away with anger and pity . . . the two women went to the Pope, and insisted that he give them the prisoners. Meanwhile Michelotto, most wretched of criminals and most criminal of wretches, suffocated Alfonso who was indignantly reproving him for his offence. The women, returning from the Pope, found armed men at the door of the chamber, who prevented them from entering and announced that Alfonso was dead . . . The women, terrified by this most cruel deed, oppressed by fear, beside themselves with grief, filled the palace with their shrieking, lamenting and wailing, one calling on her husband, the other on her brother, and their tears were without end.
This time there was no doubt as to who had ordered the crime: Michelotto, an illegitimate son of the Count of Corella and a close confidant of Cesare, was well known to be Cesare’s ‘executioner’. From the first assault, Francesco Cappello had diagnosed its cause as ‘a matter between themselves, because in that Palace there are so many old and new hatreds, and so much envy and jealousy for political reasons and others . . .’ An internal power struggle between the partisans of France and those of Aragon had been waged in the Vatican for some time past, the ultimate prize being the mind of the Pope. There is little doubt that while Cesare was away in France the Aragonese party round Alfonso and Sancia had tried to win back Alexander to his old allegiance to Spain and the house of Aragon from which Louis’s promises for Cesare had weaned him. When Cesare returned to Rome after his prolonged absence, he was quick to sense an undercurrent within the family circle in opposition to his interests. Sancia and Jofre, Alfonso and Lucrezia had lived on terms of the closest intimacy since Alfonso had rejoined the family in Spoleto the previous autumn and Sancia had been allowed to return to Rome some time during the winter. This close-knit clique would clearly have had Aragonese sympathies: Jofre, a cipher, in the absence of his elder brother was dominated by his strong-willed wife, while Lucrezia, who had wept so bitterly when Alfonso left Rome, had clearly been much in love with him.
With his fiercely competitive nature and overriding ambition, Cesare was not a man to brook opposition within his own family circle, above all when it threatened his own interests, not only his political commitment to the French alliance, but also his personal position within the Vatican and his two closest relationships with his father and sister. At this stage in his career, dependent on his father as the source of his power, he was determined that Alexander should follow the path which suited his interests, and that no one should come between them. As far as Lucrezia was concerned, his intense love for her was well known, and while he may have feared that her pro-Aragonese sympathies might have influenced her father, who doted on her, jealousy of her evident feeling for her husband would have fuelled his hatred for Alfonso. Thus Cesare saw Alfonso as a threat to himself which must be eliminated and, in the political context of a French campaign against Naples, as an embarrassment whose removal would be an advantage. He may well initially have made use of the Orsini to attack Alfonso and, when they bungled it, waited to see if his brother-in-law would die of his wounds. When it became obvious that Alfonso was recovering, Cesare took direct and brutal steps to finish him off.
The excuse given out for this cruel murder was that Alfonso had attempted to kill Cesare with a crossbow shot as he walked in the garden. It was necessary to persuade Alexander, who had originally been very upset by the assault on Alfonso, that his son-in-law had deserved to die. Alexander seems to have accepted it but almost no one else did. Brandolinus gave the majority verdict on the murder of Bisceglie: it was, he wrote, motivated by ‘the supreme lust for dominion of Cesare Valentino Borgia’.
Lucrezia, however, did not accept it. She grieved for Alfonso and raged against her father and brother. Her grief irritated and displeased Alexander and early in September she was packed off to Nepi to mourn out of sight. On 4 September, Cattaneo reported to Mantua that the Pope ‘has sent away his daughter and his daughter-in-law and everyone except Valencia because in the end they were wearisome to him’. Cesare, ostentatiously guarded, visited Lucrezia the day after the unfortunate Alfonso had been privately and hastily interred, as Cattaneo reported: ‘Valentia goes about very strong and heavily guarded now and the second day after Don Alfonso was most privately buried, this Valentia went to visit his sister D. Lucretia in her house which adjoins Valentia’s apartments. From the Palace he entered her antechamber in the midst of one hundred halberdiers in full armour, and seems to have great suspicion of the Colonnesi and the King of Naples, it seeming to him that there can be no more friendship between them.’22 Whether Lucrezia forgave him for murdering her husband, there is no way of knowing. It seems a proof of the extraordinary affection between them that Cesare could contemplate visiting her so soon. Perhaps he attempted to excuse himself on the grounds of Alfonso plotting against him; perhaps he also revealed to her his future campaign which would include the destruction of her first husband, Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro. He may even have told her of the plans he and Alexander had for her. On the day Lucrezia left for Nepi, her father was reported as already contemplating a third marriage for her, collecting money for her dowry with the nomination of further cardinals.23
The murder of Bisceglie, a deliberate act of terror, had had its effect. The Borgias, and Cesare in particular, were now regarded with fear and horror. As the Florentine Francesco Cappello wrote in a cipher letter reporting Bisceglie’s death to his government: ‘I pray Your Lordships to take this for your own information, and not to show it to others, for these [the Borgias] are men to be watched, otherwise they have done a thousand villainies, and have spies in every place.’ That autumn, the Venetian envoy Polo Capello made a long report to the Senate concerning the Borgias. The Pope, he said ‘is seventy and grows younger every day. Worries never last him a night: he loves life, and is of a joyful nature and does what suits him.’ As Pope, his power in Rome was absolute: ‘The Cardinals without the Pope can do zero’; only Giuliano della Rovere was marked down as a dangerous man. Alexander’s resilience was indeed remarkable: neither his recent escape from death nor the murder of his son-in-law, not even his daughter’s grief, affected him. Giulia Farnese, whose husband had been killed by a falling roof that August, had returned and was once more by his side. Capello’s picture of Cesare was far more sinister: ‘the Pope loves and fears his son who is twenty-seven, physically most beautiful, he is tall and well made . . . he is munificent, even prodigal, and this displeases the Pope’. As early as July the acute Cattaneo had diagnosed the scope of the Borgias’ ambitions for Cesare. ‘The Pope plans to make him great and king of Italy, if he can,’ he wrote, ‘nor am I dreaming but everything can be described and written down, and so that others will not think my brains are disordered, I will say no more . . .’ Capello expressed similar opinions: ‘He will be, if he lives, one of the first captains of Italy.’ But while admitting Cesare’s talent and physical beauty, Capello went on to depict him as a sadistic murderer, stabbing Perotto as he cowered under the Pope’s cloak so that the blood spurted up in Alexander’s face, ordering the death of Gandia and wholesale assassinations: ‘Every day in Rome one finds men murdered, four or five a night, bishops, prelates and others . . .’
Capello continued, further accusing Cesare of incest with Lucrezia: ‘And they say this Duke [sleeps with] his sister.’ Apart from the charge of incest, Lucrezia escapes the general censure: formerly the Pope’s favourite, she is ‘wise and generous, but now the Pope does not love her so much and sends her to Nepi, and has given her Sermoneta which has cost 80,000 ducats, although the Duke has taken it from her, saying “She is a woman, she could not keep it.’” Incestuous or not, there is no doubt that Cesare and Lucrezia loved each other above anyone else and remained loyal to each other to the end. Lucrezia was the only exception to Cesare’s dismissal of women as irrelevant. To Bishop Soderini of Florence, discussing the brave, cruel and sexually insatiable Caterina Sforza, a remarkable woman by any standards, whom he was accused of abusing, he said later ‘that he took no account of women’.
The murder of Bisceglie had indeed struck terror into the hearts of the Italian aristocratic families. Cesare’s ruthlessness and his power made them wonder who he might strike next. The Gonzaga made fruitless attempts to enlist the protection of the Emperor Maximilian, comparing themselves and their fellow signori to condemned men who watch their friends hanged one by one without being able to help.24 Earlier, as an insurance policy against attack by Cesare, the Gonzaga had begun negotiations for the marriage of Cesare’s legitimate daughter by Charlotte d’Albret, Luisa, with their infant son and heir, Federico. A letter Isabella d’Este wrote to her husband, Francesco Gonzaga, on 29 July after the attack on Bisceglie shows the extreme nervousness with which they approached Cesare: she doubted the wisdom of sending an envoy to ‘Valentino’ to discuss his daughter’s possible dowry, ‘because he [Cesare] has little respect for me and even less than he has for Your Lordship. It has been agreed to use the means of the Illustrious Lady Lucrecia, as the Duke of Urbino reminds us . . .’25 Only Lucrezia, it seems, was seen to have any influence with Cesare.
On 2 October, Cesare, accompanied by his personal staff and the customary signorial retinue of poets, singers and musicians, rode out of Rome northward up the Via Flaminia bound for his second campaign of conquest. Ahead of him marched his army of some 10,000 men – 700 men at arms, 200 light horse and 6,000 Spanish, Italian, Gascon and Swiss infantry, with an artillery train under the condottiere and lord of Città di Castello, Vitellozzo Vitelli. His captains were Spanish professionals – Miguel da Corella ‘Michelotto’, Juan de Cardona, Ugo de Moncada – his Italiancondottieri, Paolo and Carlo Orsini, Gian Paolo Baglioni and Ercole Bentivoglio waited for him in Umbria and the Romagna. On his way north he stopped off to visit Lucrezia in exile in the fortress of Nepi.