8
The conclave that followed the death of Pius II was the second in which Rodrigo Borgia took part, and it came at a time when his role in the hierarchy was subtly changing. He was entering his mid-thirties now, and he had proved himself as vice-chancellor and right hand to two successive pontiffs. Though still much too young to be considered papabile, a possible candidate for elevation to the throne, he was no longer either a green novice or quite the Spanish alien that he had seemed during the reign of his uncle.
He was, to the contrary, very much a Vatican insider and a consummately skilled ecclesiastical politician. Though the conclave of 1464 was the only one he would ever attend without playing a significant part, his passivity in this one instance was entirely the result of physical incapacity: he remained so debilitated by the bout of bubonic plague that had brought him low in Ancona that he was reported as attending one session of the conclave with his head bound up in cloths.
Fortunately for Rodrigo, there was no great need for him to exert himself because there was never much danger that anyone hostile to him would be chosen as Pius’s successor. Among the cardinals who appeared to have support as the conclave opened, two, Carvajal and Torquemada, were Spaniards and could be depended upon to embrace Rodrigo and his kin as allies if by some chance either of them was elected. Guillaume d’Estouteville, who had tried so hard to bluff, bribe, and bully his way to the throne in 1458, remained France’s most powerful churchman and a highly visible presence in Rome, with apparently unlimited financial resources and a gnawing hunger for the papal tiara. He had reason to blame Rodrigo for the worst of his disappointments, his failure at the conclave that had turned Enea Silvio Piccolomini into Pius II, but his chances of pulling together a two-thirds majority were now smaller than ever. As for the bloc from which the new pope was almost certain to be chosen, the ten Italians who made up more than half of the cardinals present, there was only one among them whom Rodrigo had reason to fear. This was Latino Orsini, on whose family Calixtus III had made war. But Latino was not the fountain of energy and wrath he once had been, and in the six years of Pius’s reign the membership of the Sacred College had changed to such an extent that he no longer had the power either to elect a candidate of his own choosing or to veto anyone he disliked. As for his own election, like Estouteville’s it was out of the question.
Rodrigo, in eight years as a cardinal and seven in the most important post in the Church after the pope, had learned a good many things about papal conclaves and the papacy itself. Of conclaves he had learned that once the doors were locked anything could happen, that what did happen was often totally unexpected, that great wealth and power were not only no guarantee of election but if clumsily employed could be self-defeating, and that promises made in the pursuit of votes could safely be forgotten once the voting was done. Of the papacy he had learned that nepotism was not only acceptable but understood to be desirable if not carried to extremes, that popes never had enough money and therefore were well advised to be coldly self-interested in the management of their finances, and that as a general rule it was best not to trust anyone—certainly not the rulers of the Italian city-states or crowned heads anywhere.
What he would be a long time learning was the difficulty, seemingly the near impossibility, of ruling successfully and bringing a reign to a satisfying conclusion. Almost the whole history of the papacy could have been drawn upon as evidence that the institution was a poisoned chalice and that whoever drank from it was doomed to disillusionment, failure, and grief. Such words describe the fate of Calixtus III and of Pius II and of earlier pontiffs beyond numbering. That intelligent men continued to fight for such an office is testimony both to the human hunger for power and, less often, to the price some good men were willing to pay in order to extract the Church from its recurrent calamities.
The cardinals present at the conclave of 1464 were for the most part concerned not with great issues but with extracting themselves from their own predicament and concluding their business at the earliest possible moment. Their predicament was the sense of being trapped in a dangerous situation in a dangerous place. Their hurry was propelled by fear: of the Roman mob, which was using the death of a Tuscan pope as an excuse to ransack the homes and businesses of the city’s Tuscan residents; of Pius’s ambitious nephew Antonio, recently elevated to duke of Amalfi, who remained captain-general of the papal army and seemed poised to interfere in the election; of the very office the cardinals had come together to fill.
The last-mentioned fear is, paradoxically, the one that gripped the conclave most fiercely. The cardinals could and did extract from Duke Antonio a pledge that he would surrender both his office and the Castel Sant’Angelo as soon as the election was concluded and that he would meanwhile do what he could to maintain some measure of order in the streets of Rome. The contest between papacy and Sacred College was a far more worrisome matter and not so easily resolved. Many of the cardinals were uneasy, to say the least, about the extent to which the power of the popes had been growing at their expense. Therefore they made it their first order of business to draw up a list of the most challenging capitulations ever adopted by a conclave. With one obscure exception, every cardinal affixed his signature to this list, thereby pledging to do the following if elected:
Convene a general council of the Church to meet three years after the election (it being understood that the purpose of this council would be to put constraints on the pope).
Limit the Sacred College to twenty-four members (so as not to dilute the power of individual members).
Appoint no cardinal under the age of thirty.
Appoint only one nephew.
And appoint only “learned men.”
Additionally, and far more radically, the capitulations stipulated that without the approval of the college the pope could thenceforth appoint no cardinals, enter into no political alliances, declare no wars, and dispose of no Church territory.
Finally, and least controversially, there was a pledge to make war on the Turks.
These capitulations were intended to effect a profound change in the character of the papacy and the constitution of the Church. They amounted to a blunt rejection of the notion that the pope was not only a monarch but an absolute monarch, and that he ruledover, rather than with, the Sacred College. For those who rejected the monarchical principle, the acceptance of the capitulations by every cardinal with any chance of being elected must have seemed to presage a long-sought, epic victory: the demotion of the pope to a kind of chairman of the board, presiding over but not dictating to an oligarchy of cardinals.
This accomplished, the conclave got down to the business of voting. A first ballot, in which each cardinal was permitted to cast three votes, produced seven for the fierce old warrior Scarampo, nine for the tirelessly self-promoting Estouteville, and eleven for the colorless but unobjectionable Pietro Barbo of Venice. This Barbo was the same nephew of Pope Eugenius IV who in 1455 had been put forward as the candidate of the Orsini only to be blocked by Prospero Colonna. Prospero, however, was now in his tomb, the Sacred College was for the time being without a Colonna, and Barbo had reached an age, forty-seven, at which he could be considered marginally ready to receive the papal crown. Still in a hurry to be finished, sensing that a conclusion had come within reach, the cardinals immediately moved on to the process of accession. Barbo had no difficulty in securing the additional votes needed for election—in fact he quickly had fifteen of the nineteen votes cast—and it was done. The conclave had lasted little more than forty-eight hours.
It is reasonable to surmise that Rodrigo must have voted for Barbo at the end and was probably doing so from the beginning. The two were friends of long standing (the reader will recall that it was Cardinal Barbo who had helped Rodrigo spirit Pedro Luis Borgia out of Rome as Calixtus III lay dying), and Barbo’s actions after his election do not suggest that Rodrigo had done anything to damage the relationship. Be all that as it may, there was nothing startling about how the election turned out and no evident reason for anyone to be alarmed. Though not particularly distinguished intellectually or extravagantly well endowed with political connections, Barbo was an attractive enough candidate, tall and handsome with a dignified demeanor, known for his kindness, gentleness, and generosity. He was honest as well, and though somewhat chilly in demeanor had never shown much appetite for conflict. Apart from indulging a passion for ancient coins and precious stones and spending huge sums on transforming the Roman residence of Venice’s cardinals into the city’s first great Renaissance palace, he had always lived simply and kept himself free of scandal.
After the failure of his candidacy in 1455, Barbo had remained sufficiently well thought of to again receive notable support in the conclave of 1458. The factor that made the difference in 1464 was his Venetian birth. Venice by this juncture was enmeshed in a costly and open-ended war with the Turks and therefore was eager for an alliance with Rome and almost desperately enthusiastic about the idea of a great pan-European crusade. Thus the Roman faction in the Sacred College had reason to regard Venice as a friend rather than as a nuisance unwilling to admit the gravity of the Ottoman menace. The cardinals could now expect a pope whose family was rooted in Venice to pursue the fight against the Turks with all possible vigor.
One thing, however, could not possibly have been understood within the conclave or Barbo would never have been elected. The new pope carried within him an uncompromising belief in the papacy as supreme, in the pope as sovereign over cardinals, councils, emperors, and all other challengers. Like many and probably most of his fellow cardinals, he had signed the capitulations without any intention of honoring them if he became pope. This became clear almost immediately after his election, when three days passed without his publishing—as the capitulations themselves required—a bull confirming everything that had been pledged. The new Pope Paul II did, however, go to some lengths to soften his betrayal. (If betrayal it was; not only had capitulations been regularly ignored by Paul’s predecessors, but it was not difficult to find scholars who declared them to be so fundamentally invalid as to have no binding force.) It was Paul who introduced the practice of dressing cardinals in silken red robes and officially elevated them to the status of “princes of the Church,” the equals of dukes and lower than no one except popes (of course) and hereditary royalty. He ordered that cardinals when in public should always be surrounded by platoons of retainers and conferred generous stipends on those lacking independent means. An implicit bargain was being struck: the cardinals could be among the most exalted personages in all Europe, but only by acknowledging that the pope was their master. Appointment to the Sacred College would be a guarantee of wealth, influence, and a life of privilege, but only by providing access to the one man empowered to dispense such prizes. This proved an effective strategy. It became a prototype for the process by which, generations later, secular rulers such as Louis XIV of France would seduce once-dangerous nobles into submitting to central—meaning royal—authority.
For Cardinal Rodrigo, Paul II’s reign became an advanced course in just how poisonous the papacy could be even for a well-intended pope, and how much bitterness and humiliation the fates could heap upon those who won the throne. Paul’s exalted view of his office embroiled him in conflicts of many kinds: with the baronial clans in and near Rome, with the warlords who ruled the more distant Papal States, with the leading Italian princes, and even with his fellow monarchs beyond the Italian peninsula. This is one reason why history has not dealt kindly with him, but there are other reasons as well. Biographers never fail to note that his motives in embarking on an ecclesiastical career had been unedifying if not really ignoble. He had been a youth of good family preparing for a life as a Venetian trader—in fact was about to leave home for a position overseas—when news reached Venice that Cardinal Gabriele Condulmer had been elected pope. Condulmer being his mother’s brother, young Pietro decided that his prospects would be brighter in the Church than in business and so took holy orders. He was not wrong in his calculations, becoming a cardinal when scarcely more than a boy, but the authenticity of his religious vocation was always open to question.
As pope he alienated his former colleagues by not only ignoring the capitulations but flouting one of their key provisions, appointing three young nephews to the Sacred College. That the three in the course of long careers would prove themselves worthy of their high positions could of course not be known at the time of their appointment, and so it did nothing to ease the annoyance of the men who had elected their uncle. Paul also raised eyebrows with the eccentric lifestyle he adopted upon taking office, sleeping during the day and granting audiences in the middle of the night only. It seems possible, in light of his compassionate nature and the seriousness with which he embraced his new responsibilities, that his upside-down schedule was intended to reduce the number of supplicants coming to ask favors, thereby sparing him the pain of having to say no. Whatever the motive, his schedule was a headache for those with business that required his attention. It was also unhealthy for the pope himself, increasing his isolation and aggravating his inclination to be distrustful.
Long after his death, historians would depict Paul II as an egomaniac, neurotically hungry to aggrandize himself, insistent on excessive display, and draping himself in flamboyant attire on ceremonial occasions. Such complaints are true enough as far as they go—Paul certainly went to extremes in demanding that his ceremonies be splendid—but it is also possible to see his behavior less as frivolous waste than as a political technique. In Renaissance Europe no less than in the Middle Ages, power had to be displayed to be credible. Even in distant England, a ruler as parsimonious as Henry VII would spend lavishly on grand palaces and grandiose courtly displays and would do so for baldly political reasons. Much the same can be said of the increasing elaboration of the Church’s ceremonies and celebrations in the same century: susceptible to being depicted as disgraceful, explainable as a cost of doing business.
Even as a young man Pietro Barbo had struck people who did not know him as haughty, even cold. A story often told about him is that, upon being elected pope, he declared his intention to take the name Formosus, not in honor of a ninth-century predecessor of that name but because it meant “good-looking.” The cardinals, it is said, had to argue hard to dissuade him from this frivolous display of self-love. The truth is that Barbo was complicated in ways bound to produce misunderstanding, an introvert whose stony demeanor concealed a soft heart. All his life he had been openhanded with his wealth, funding hospitals for the needy and the distribution of free medicines. He continued these benefactions as pope, giving particular attention to widows, invalids, and displaced persons. He was repulsed by violence of whatever kind, war and lawful executions included, and throughout his papacy he would be an active supporter of monastic reform. He attacked official corruption by forbidding legates, governors, and judges to accept gifts and applied the prohibition to himself.
In short, Paul made a serious and sustained effort to be everything he thought a good pope should be. Even his critics—who have always been legion and have rarely stopped short of hinting at an irregular sexual orientation—uniformly acknowledge that he maintained high standards in choosing his associates and distributing favors. They concede also that during his reign offices and benefices were awarded on the basis of merit rather than cronyism or bribery. It reveals a certain largeness of spirit that the cardinals who became his closest confidants and advisers were his former rivals for the papacy, Bessarion and Carvajal. The two were universally recognized as among the finest churchmen of the time, not only untouched by any hint of corruption but unwilling to keep silent about corruption when they encountered it. That they became and remained central figures in Paul’s administration is a point to be taken into account when judging the character of his reign. Similarly, his attitude toward the vice-chancellor is the best clue we have to what kind of life Cardinal Borgia was living as he approached age forty. Paul like Pius and Calixtus displayed high confidence in Rodrigo, significantly expanding his responsibilities and authority, increasing the number of Curial offices he was empowered to fill, and conferring upon him a number of benefices (all of them in Spain, to avoid angering the Italians). Everything we know about Paul II makes it difficult to believe that he could have shown so much favor to a subordinate whom he so much as suspected of inappropriate conduct.
Neither high standards nor worthy companions, however, were sufficient to make Paul a successful or even a popular pope. The opposition he aroused in asserting his own supremacy was simply too substantial to be overcome. He began, logically enough, with the Papal States, it being his belief that he had not only the right but the duty to make himself their ruler in fact as much as in principle. And things went reasonably well in the early going. In the Romagna, after experiencing some early setbacks, he had had the good sense or good luck to employ the services of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, who quickly broke the power of the rebellious Malatesta of Rimini.
Things went even better when Paul chose, as his next objective, a piece of papal territory less than a day’s journey north of Rome. This had for years been the domain of Eversus Anguillara, patriarch of a family of ruffians and bandits that had taken advantage of the weakness of the papacy to seize a number of towns and impose on them a brutishly harsh regime. Eversus having died, Paul again hired Montefeltro, along with Napoleone Orsini, lord of Bracciano, and dispatched them to drive out Anguillara’s sons. In short order thirteen castles were taken and the tyrants put to flight. The end result, however, was not what the pope had in mind: the Orsini took over many of the properties from which the Anguillara had been expelled, strengthening their position north of Rome and with it their own ability to make trouble. This was another step in the education of Rodrigo Borgia, looking on from Rome. It demonstrated anew both the need to deal with the warlord clans and the difficulties of doing so in ways that made a meaningful difference.
The attack on the Anguillara was, in any case, the end of Paul’s good luck. When he turned his attention to a more ambitious target, the great papal fiefdom of Bologna, things quickly went wrong. Bologna, rich and powerful since the days of the Roman Empire, was in the grip of a tight little circle of dominant families. The pope regarded this flagrantly self-serving oligarchy as a disgrace to the papacy, which as overlord was supposed to be in charge. But when he demanded reforms, he met with more resistance than he had the means to overcome, and in the end he agreed to a settlement that served no purpose except to allow much of the power of the oligarchs to pass into the hands of a single family, the Bentivoglii. Once again, intervention had produced unintended and distinctly unwelcome consequences. As a result, Bologna would be an even more intractable problem for Paul’s successors than it had ever been for his predecessors.
Mistake followed mistake, failure begot failure. Most humiliating of all was a crisis that erupted at home, within the Curia. Paul was unusual among Renaissance pontiffs in having no perceptible interest in humanistic studies. He disliked the classicists’ celebration of pagan antiquity and therefore resented the costs of maintaining the Vatican’s College of Abbreviators, a privileged clique of literary men, officially scribes or secretaries, whose membership had been increased to seventy by Pius II. Paul suspected the abbreviators, not without reason, of harboring heretical beliefs and dreams of making Rome a republic once again. When reports reached him that they were involved in a plot to imprison or kill him and take command of the city, Paul’s response was to declare the college abolished. Their jobs disappeared with it, and as many of them had paid hard cash for their positions, the ferocity of their resentment is not hard to understand.
Though the rebellion that ensued was a tiny one with no possibility of accomplishing anything, it did leave Paul besieged in his palace for some three weeks. The outcome was inevitable—the rebels were subdued and taken prisoner, Paul liberated—but the whole thing had been a profound embarrassment. It showed the pope to be so weak that he could be put in peril by fewer than a hundred of his own scribbling scholars. The episode also assured that Paul would be known as a bad man and bad pope more or less forever. The leading troublemaker among the abbreviators, Bartolomeo Platina, somehow expected to be reemployed upon his release from confinement, and when this did not happen, he was freshly offended. He took his revenge years later by writing Lives of the Popes, which depicted Paul II as a monster of cruelty and sexual depravity. His description has long since been shown to bear little connection to the truth, but the damage to its subject’s reputation proved to be lasting.
Still worse was to come. In 1469 word reached Rome that the tireless Sultan Mehmed II was assembling an army of eighty thousand men and an enormous fleet of galleys for a fresh offensive and that his target this time was to be the city of Negropont in the Aegean Sea. Negropont was a key Venetian stronghold, one of the serene republic’s essential colonial possessions, and its loss would be a disaster of the first order. Venice tried to rise to the challenge, extracting forced loans from its wealthier citizens and using the money to hurriedly expand its war fleet. By the time the Turkish attack came in 1470, the Venetians were ready. Negropont was under siege but holding out, its walls being slowly reduced to rubble by the Turks’ guns, when Venice’s fleet came racing over the horizon. The plan was to sever the Ottoman lines of supply, which would force the attackers to withdraw. Success seemed certain when suddenly the inexperienced Venetian commander lost his nerve and ordered his galleys to turn back. Negropont fell to the Turks just a day later, and its population was slaughtered. The city’s governor, who had surrendered on condition that he not lose his head, was cut in half at the waist instead. It was the greatest Turkish success since the conquest of Bosnia in 1463. Coming on the heels of the death of Skanderbeg of Albania, who had fallen victim to malaria, it awoke all Italy to just how great the danger now was. The peninsula’s leading powers and a number of the secondary ones came together once again in the new League of Lodi, a nonaggression pact akin to the one that had brought peace to Italy in the last days of Nicholas V. Peace was once again assured, at least for the time being, but it was a peace of a fearful and demoralized kind.
One evening a year after the fall of Negropont, Pope Paul, still only fifty-four years old, became ill after a hard day that had included six hours spent in consistory. He canceled the audiences scheduled for that night and retired to his bedchamber. Hours later his attendants found him dead, the victim of “apoplexy” according to his baffled physicians, probably of a stroke. It was said that he died from overindulging in melons, which must be a medical first of some kind, and stories of how he had suffered a fatal seizure while being sodomized by a young favorite would years later make their way into print. There is no contemporary testimony to any such thing, and no reputable commentator believes it today.
It makes more sense to suggest that Paul II had drunk too deeply from the supposedly great prize he had won seven years before and had become its latest victim.
Background
THE INEXTINGUISHABLE EVIL-HEADS
THE STORY OF THE POPES AND THE ROMAGNA REGION OF northeastern Italy, from early times part of the Papal States, is a long, dismal chronicle of bloodshed, betrayal, and tragic outcomes. And it appears in perfect capsule form in the story of one family: the Malatesta of Rimini.
Malatesta: the word translates as something like “evil-head.” It is not necessary to delve very deep into the family’s history to get some understanding of why this came to be its name. Generation after generation over a period of two centuries, the Malatesta repeatedly shocked even their violent age with the extravagance of their crimes. They came to embody much of what was worst, along with a little of what was best, in the Italy of their time.
They first appear in history in the twelfth century as one of the first families to become noteworthy as soldiers-for-hire. Early in the thirteenth century they took a decisive step up, playing one side against the other as the popes in Rome fought the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II for supremacy in Italy, and establishing themselves as masters of several towns. Before the end of that century they were the lords of Rimini, which from that time forward would be the capital and main stronghold of the family’s senior branch.
A rich lore would grow up around any princely family that stayed in power very long, but the tales told of the Malatesta were different: singularly horrific, and also generally true. The oldest and most famous of these tales—Dante included it in The Inferno, and it has been the subject of dozens of operas and plays—is that of Francesca da Rimini. She was the bride of a physically deformed Malatesta lord, fell in love and had an affair with her husband’s charming brother, and was butchered along with her lover when the husband found them out. History repeated itself more than a century later when the fourteen-year-old Parisina Malatesta was married to Niccolò d’Este lord of Ferrara, twenty years her senior. This Niccolò had an illegitimate son a year younger than his bride, and again an affair ensued. When the lovers were discovered and young Ugo d’Este was put to death, Parisina cried out, “Now I no longer want to live!” Her husband obliged her by cutting off her head.
If these were the most romantic episodes in the history of the Malatesta, they were by no means the bloodiest. But ruthlessness and cruelty were useful in their world, and as the Malatesta went on with murdering their enemies and one another, they also gradually came into possession of a little mini-empire of cities and towns scattered across the Romagna and the March of Ancona. As they did so—here we touch on one of the paradoxes of Renaissance Italy—they also showed themselves to be improbably cultivated, lovers of literature and patrons of the arts. They built up a great library, which survives today, and early in the fifteenth century one of the lords of Rimini came to be known as “Malatesta of the sonnets.”
The most notorious and in his way the greatest of the Malatesta was born in 1417 and grew up to become the plague of popes and kings. This was Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, tall and powerfully built, blue-eyed and golden-haired, with the moral code of a sociopath. He first went soldiering at age thirteen, a year later took command of Rimini’s defenses and fought off an attack by some Malatesta cousins, and succeeded to the lordship of the city one year after that. He was intelligent, a poet, a patron of artists and architects, so talented a general as to be described by some as a military genius. He was also so unscrupulous, so hungry for conquest, that finally no one could trust him. The stories told about him defy belief; he was said to have murdered two wives, copulated with his daughters, and been stopped at knifepoint from raping his son. The worst of these tales are almost certainly fabrications—Pope Pius II, who hated him as he hated no one else on earth, was the source of many of the most hair-raising of them—but it is nonetheless certain that he was capable of atrocious acts. The same cousins whom he had bested at Rimini at age fourteen later became so terrified of him that to escape his wrath they sold their home city of Pesaro to the duke of Milan.
The assortment of enemies that Sigismondo accumulated would have caused most men to reconsider their conduct, but he was fearless quite literally to a fault. Among those who sought his destruction were Alfonso V of Aragon and then his son Ferrante, Pope Pius II and then his successor, Paul. What would ultimately matter more, Federico da Montefeltro, a general who was an even better soldier than he and a far cooler head, came to hate him bitterly. Montefeltro’s home city of Urbino was not distant from Malatesta’s Rimini, which meant that, both men being ambitious to expand their domains, they were fated to collide. Things first turned seriously ugly in the late 1450s, when the two became embroiled in a dispute over the towns of Mondavio in the March of Ancona and Senigallia on the Romagna coast. Pope Pius was invited to arbitrate, but his decision left Malatesta convinced that he had been cheated. His response was to seize Mondavio and lay siege to Senigallia, thus putting himself at war with Rome and drawing down upon himself charges of heresy and treason.
In July 1462 Malatesta met a superior papal force at Castel Leone and subjected it to such a humiliating defeat that he expected Pius to come to terms. But the pope was unwilling to give up. Instead he again hired Montefeltro, who had not been present at Castel Leone, and in one of the weirdest exercises in the history of the papacy had Malatesta burned in effigy and canonized in reverse as a damned soul. (“I am Sigismondo Malatesta, king of traitors,” a sign on the blazing dummy said. “Enemy of God and man, by sentence of the Sacred College condemned to the flames.”) In short order Montefeltro and Malatesta had their showdown, and the latter was defeated so thoroughly that the war was over.
Pius wanted to drive the now-helpless Malatesta out of his last remaining stronghold, Rimini, and take possession of it himself. But Milan and Venice intervened, declaring that they could not tolerate the establishment of a papal outpost so far north. Malatesta had to pay a hefty annual tribute and pledge to fast on bread and water every Friday for the rest of his life. He lost almost all of his territories but was allowed to keep Rimini and a bit of the adjacent countryside for as long as he lived. His brother Domenico remained lord of Cesena on the same terms. Satisfied, Pius lifted the three bulls of excommunication earlier laid on Sigismondo and approved his departure for Greece, where he became a commander of Venetian forces in the war against the Turks.
The Malatesta, it appeared, were finished. This seemed all the more certain when, in 1465, Domenico died without an heir and the lordship of Cesena became vacant. Paul II, just a year into his papacy, moved quickly to take possession. Under ordinary circumstances such a step would have been opposed by the leading powers of the north, all of which coveted the Romagna and none of which wanted to see Rome entrench itself in the region. But Paul was lucky in his timing. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was in no position to do anything, obviously. Florence was distracted by upheavals following the death of its leader Cosimo de’ Medici; Milan’s Duke Francesco Sforza was incapacitated by dropsy and gout; and the Venetians, locked in their war with the Turks, were unwilling to risk offending their ally the pope. In short order Cesena’s government was in the hands of a legate from Rome, and it had all been accomplished without bloodshed.
Three years later, when Sigismondo died in Rimini (he had returned from Greece sometime earlier and shortly before his death had visited Rome with the apparent intention of murdering Paul II), the pope made ready to repeat his success at Cesena. But his luck had run out. Sigismondo had left two sons, the legitimate Sallustio and the bastard Roberto, who promptly showed himself to be a true Malatesta by murdering his half-brother (he probably killed Sigismondo’s widow as well) and declaring himself lord. When the pope laid claim to the city, he was met with defiance. Roberto immediately received pledges of support from Ferrante of Naples, the Sforzas of Milan, and finally even Venice, which could see nothing good in allowing even a Venetian pope to acquire a foothold on the north Adriatic coast.
Paul preferred to avoid war even when he had the advantage, and the opposition now facing him would have made going to war an act of political suicide. And so he tried diplomacy, and the great ever-turning wheel of alliances made and alliances broken began to spin as dizzyingly as only Italy could spin it. When it came to rest in the summer of 1469, another general war was getting under way, Rome and Venice were once again allies, and on the other side were Naples, Milan, and Florence. This was the weirdest war yet, constantly throwing up surprises. Montefeltro took Rimini from Roberto Malatesta, decided to keep it for himself rather than handing it over to the papacy, then changed course again by doing what no one could possibly have imagined him doing. He switched sides and joined forces with Roberto Malatesta. Sudden and baffling changes of allegiance were common in fifteenth-century Italy, as we have seen and will see many times more, but this one seemed to come out of nowhere. That Montefeltro would come to the rescue of the son of the one man he had hated all his life was crazily improbable even by the standards of the time.
It all ended in calamity for the pope. An army jointly commanded by Montefeltro and young Malatesta went out in search of their Roman and Venetian adversaries, found them, and inflicted on them a defeat so total that Paul gave up all thought of taking Rimini. The Malatesta were back, stronger than ever, and Roberto marked his triumph by marrying one of Montefeltro’s numerous daughters. The pope could only lick his wounds, perhaps consoling himself with the thought that he was not the first pope to have failed ignominiously in the Romagna and was not likely to be the last.