Biographies & Memoirs

9

Sixtus IV: Disturbing the Peace

None of the cardinals who voted for Francesco della Rovere in August 1471 could possibly have imagined, never mind expected, the torrent of blood and grief that, as Pope Sixtus IV, he was going to bring down on Italy in the course of a thirteen-year reign.

Rodrigo Borgia was one of those cardinals—he played a conspicuous part in rounding up the votes needed for della Rovere’s election, actually—and there is no reason to think that his motives were any different from those of his colleagues. What they wanted, most of them, was a pope who would put an end to the turmoil of Paul II’s last years.

Della Rovere seemed a perfect choice: a man unlikely to stir up trouble and likely to do good instead. A native of Liguria, the tiny province that is now the Italian Riviera but five centuries ago was a place of little consequence, in his fifty-seven years he had risen high from extraordinarily humble beginnings, managing while doing so to give offense to virtually no one. He was the son of a poor fisherman and at an early age had entered the Franciscan order of mendicant or begging friars—hardly a promising path to the highest levels of the Church. He proved to be academically gifted, however, and emerged from years of study and deep poverty as a professor of theology and philosophy, a respected author, and one of the leading members of his order. His promotion to cardinal was characteristic of what was best about Paul II. It was done not for any political purpose, or as compensation for any favors rendered, but in recognition of merit.

His election as pope came about in the same way. The conclave of 1471 is often described as a conflict between two hostile parties, one made up chiefly of men named to the Sacred College by Paul (the Paoleschi), the other of Pius II’s appointees (the Pieschi). This way of explaining what happened, however, turns out to have limited value. The opening of the conclave found eighteen cardinals present; the fact that only three of them were not Italian meant that for the first time in more than two centuries the Italians had an opportunity—if they were united, which inevitably they were not—to elect one of their own without outside help. In any case the Italians were going to elect the pope, and it was almost inevitable that their choice would be Italian. When the conclave’s first ballot produced a result that was curious under the circumstances, giving the lead to the Greek Bessarion and that tireless self-promoter Estouteville of France, the obvious explanation was that almost no one present was ready to show his hand.

This was certainly true of Rodrigo. He gave his first-round vote to Bartolomeo Roverella, the archbishop of Ravenna, a respectable enough choice but with no possibility of being elected. This was a delaying tactic, a way of concealing his intentions while waiting for the other cardinals to reveal theirs. Having cast it, he began lobbying actively for della Rovere, who on the third day received thirteen votes—five Paoleschi and three Pieschi among them—and so became pope. It is not clear why four cardinals—three Pieschibut also a solitary Paoleschi—refused to give della Rovere their votes even after his election became a certainty, thereby making it impossible to tell the world that the election had been unanimous. Perhaps those four knew della Rovere better than their colleagues.

Della Rovere’s supporters knew that their choice was intelligent, immensely learned, and pious, and as Pope Sixtus IV he continued to be all those things. He showed himself to be other things as well. He quickly revealed not only a previously unsuspected toughness but a ruthlessness that could turn under pressure into outright brutality. Also completely unsuspected, and equally troubling when it manifested itself, was a devotion to his family that went almost beyond the bounds of reason. At the time of his election, most of that family was living in modest circumstances, even in near poverty, back in Liguria. With the stunning news that their kinsman had become pope, they descended upon Rome in a swarm, hoping to transform their lives. Not many were disappointed. Within a month of his election, Sixtus was dispensing favors to his relatives with a profligacy rarely if ever equaled in papal history.

Among his brother Raffaelo’s offspring were three sons in their twenties: Giuliano, who thanks to his uncle the cardinal’s patronage was already bishop of a diocese in France; Bartolomeo, who had followed the future pope into the Franciscans; and Giovanni, a layman in search of a career. In short order the brilliant, hot-tempered, and blazingly ambitious Giuliano was made a cardinal. A place was found for Giovanni in the service of the best soldier in Italy, Federico da Montefeltro, and he was also appointed vicar, governor, of the papal town of Senigallia on the Adriatic coast. Friar Bartolomeo, for whatever reason, had to wait to be given a bishopric, but the wait took barely a year. The father of this trio found himself vaulted from the obscure penury of his old life into eminence as senator of Rome.

Sixtus also had sisters, two of whom produced offspring destined to figure in the Borgia story. One of Luchina Basso’s five sons became a cardinal while all of his brothers were raised to the nobility, but none of them would be nearly as important as two of Bianca’s sons, the Franciscan friar Pietro Riario and his brother Girolamo. Their father, Paolo Riario, had been generous when his brother-in-law was a penniless young student, which may explain why Sixtus singled out the Riarii for special treatment. He gave the twenty-five-year-old Pietro the revenues of a rich abbey in northern Europe and appointed him to the College of Cardinals simultaneously with his cousin Giuliano della Rovere. Girolamo was a carefree young ruffian who in adolescence, after declining to take advantage of the educational opportunities made available by his uncle, had supported himself by selling oranges and raisins in the streets of his hometown. When his uncle was elected pope, he joined the southward stampede to Rome, and even he—arrogant lout that he was—must have been surprised by what happened next. He found himself captain-general of the papal army, a position for which he had no qualifications, and ennobled as count of Bosco. He was also put forward as a bridegroom for an illegitimate daughter of the duke of Milan, but as the girl was only eight a wedding was not yet possible.

What would have been most apparent to the senior members of the Sacred College, in the early going, was not Sixtus’s nepotism but his gratifying willingness to do as they had hoped, first by ending the conflicts to which Paul II’s assertiveness had given rise, then by succeeding where his predecessors had failed in mounting a campaign against the Turks. These goals the cardinals approved heartily, of course, and the pope so intertwined the things he did to achieve them with the advancement of his family’s interests that the former tended to camouflage the latter. His success in marrying one of the least impressive of his nephews to a princess (albeit an illegitimate princess) of Naples’s royal family was an astonishing coup for the arrivistes from Liguria, but it was no less plausibly explained as a necessary step in dissolving the ill feeling that remained from Pope Paul’s reign. The marriage of another young della Rovere into the ducal family of Urbino, and the opening of negotiations over a possible union of the onetime fruit vendor Girolamo Riario with a Sforza of Milan, also had multilayered ramifications. Such unions raised the pope’s family to a level that until recently would have been unimaginable, but their possible political value for the Church transcended even this and made criticism difficult.

Sixtus was businesslike in setting out to organize a pan-European counteroffensive against the Turks. Instead of doing the usual thing and announcing an international conference to be held in some city in or near the Alps, hoping that at least some of the powers would show up, he arranged to carry his appeal into every major capital in Europe. He announced the appointment of five cardinals who, armed with the powers of legates, were to fan out across the continent to enlist support. His choices for this assignment showed the seriousness with which he approached the challenge: able and respected men, each particularly well suited to the part of the world for which he was given responsibility. The aging and revered Bessarion was dispatched to Louis XI of France, Edward IV of England, and Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Cardinal Marco Barbo, the son of a brother of Paul II, was sent to central Europe: to Germany and the two short-lived kingdoms of Hungary-Bohemia-Croatia and Poland-Lithuania. The veteran diplomat AngeloCapranica got the thankless job of making the rounds of all the Italian principalities north of Naples and persuading them to put aside their endless quarrels and join the pope’s crusade. Naples was assigned to Oliviero Carafa, who was the son of a noble Neapolitan family and had managed through his career to stay on good terms with the devious Ferrante. Upon winning Ferrante over, Carafa was to add the Neapolitan triremes to the papal fleet and set off for Ottoman waters.

The selection of Rodrigo Borgia as legate in the Iberian peninsula was all but inevitable. He was now the only Spanish cardinal in Rome—the only Spanish cardinal alive, aside from his cousin Luis Juan del Milà, who had long since withdrawn to his diocese of Lérida and was never seen in Italy—and was also the obvious choice by virtue of the pope’s high regard. Not only in this instance but throughout his reign, Sixtus would rely heavily on Rodrigo as vice-chancellor and turn to him when needing help in areas unrelated to work of the chancery. There would be no assignment more daunting than the one he now took on, because the prospects of finding substantial support for a crusade were even worse in Iberia than in the rest of Europe. What would eventually become the kingdom of Spain did not yet exist. Granada in the south remained a Muslim emirate and an outpost of Islamic North Africa, and though the peninsula’s Christian regions were no longer as politically fragmented as they once had been, they were still divided into the four kingdoms of Aragon, Castile, Portugal, and Navarre. Aragon and Castile were both ruled by branches of the House of Trastámara, but this did not keep them from being recurrently at odds.

In returning to the land of his birth Rodrigo would be stepping into a tangle of dynastic and ecclesiastical disputes, all of them involving dangerous questions of money and power. It is a measure of the pope’s confidence that, rather than cautioning Rodrigo to limit himself to the proposed war on the Turks and keep clear of other, thornier issues, he empowered him to deal with almost anything he might encounter in whatever way he thought best. He was granted authority to dispense papal indulgences in return for support of the crusade, pardon crimes other than murder, settle property disputes, impose a special tithe on the incomes of Spanish clerics, and even offer appointments to the College of Cardinals. Later, when these powers appeared to be insufficient for dealing with the problems Rodrigo encountered, Sixtus would send out new bulls granting him still more. Among them was authority to excommunicate, though there is no evidence that Rodrigo ever used it.

Such a high-level diplomatic mission involved transporting all the people and matériel required for a grand display of ecclesiastical splendor. It was therefore vastly expensive, which brings us back to the subject of Cardinal Borgia’s finances. When Pope Sixtus, upon taking office, followed the established practice of distributing the benefices he had held at the time of his election, he triggered as usual a game of musical chairs: many of the cardinals had to surrender offices they already possessed in order to accept others. Rodrigo was given the rich abbey of Subiaco near Tivoli and the bishopric of Albano in central Italy. Finally and more remarkably, a papal bull dispensed him from having to give up the see of Valencia or any of the other benefices bestowed on him by earlier popes.

Setting aside the obvious undesirability of allowing any single individual to be bishop of two or more cities (a practice that would not be ended until the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century), it was no proof of wickedness or indeed of simony. To the contrary, when not used as a way of capriciously enriching family and favorites, it could be not only practical but nearly unavoidable. The test, surely, is whether the incomes in question were used to good purpose or simply to indulge the recipient. Sixtus fails that test badly in some instances—grossly where his favorite nephews are concerned—but not in the case of Rodrigo Borgia. What happened in the two months following his appointment as legate indicates that, far from getting rich, Rodrigo was once again seriously short of funds. On January 17, 1472, Sixtus signed a bull permitting him to auction the income due from his benefices over the next three years. On March 6, with his departure for Spain only two months off, he was authorized to mortgage the revenues of the chancery as well. Such favors would never have been granted if Rodrigo had not requested them. Because their net result would be a significant reduction in his income over several years, he would not have asked if his need had not been serious.

His arrival at Valencia on June 17 was treated as a great event, with the governor-general heading a reception committee of dignitaries and the walls of the city draped in crimson cloth. Rodrigo was a quadruply noteworthy guest of honor: Valencia’s absentee bishop, a cardinal, the pope’s personal representative, and a native son returning home in glory. As soon as the formalities had been completed and Rodrigo had delivered an address to the assembled clergy of his diocese, he moved up the coast to the Catalonian province of Tarragona. There he met for the first time King Juan of Aragon, the complexity of whose character is reflected in the fact that he was called by some Juan the Great, by others Juan the Faithless. Younger brother of the late Alfonso V, uncle of Ferrante of Naples, Juan was tough and ambitious, a ruthless political infighter. Having arrived at his court, Rodrigo was able to get down to the business that had brought him to Spain.

At the top of his agenda, of course, was bringing the kingdom of Aragon and its satellites into an international coalition to fight the Turks. Juan, predictably uninspired by the idea, replied that he had far too many problems to do any such thing. He had a war on his hands, thanks to the refusal of the people of Catalonia to accept absorption into Aragon on his terms. At the time of Rodrigo’s arrival he had been besieging Barcelona for almost a year without result. What was at least as frustrating, his attempt to unite Aragon and Castile by marrying his son and heir Ferdinand to the king of Castile’s half-sister and supposed heir Isabella had gone so badly wrong that it was no longer certain that Isabella was in fact her brother’s heir—or that her marriage to Ferdinand was valid.

Seeing that he had no chance of accomplishing the pope’s purposes unless Juan were somehow extracted from these difficulties, Rodrigo undertook to perform the extractions personally. He obtained the king’s permission to go to Barcelona and talk with the defenders, searching for terms on which the siege might be satisfactorily concluded. When he came away, it seemed that he had failed, that the Catalans were unwilling to compromise. But soon thereafter—whether because their situation inside the besieged city was becoming unsustainable, or because of the new options that Rodrigo had opened to them—the Catalans made themselves available for talks. Juan, accepting the cardinal’s counsel, responded in encouraging terms. The result was peace—a peace that had been inaccessible until Rodrigo’s intervention. No account of how he accomplished this exists, but the engaging frankness that he brought to all his relationships—the openness and candor with which, for example, he had responded when Cardinal Piccolomini challenged his decision to vote for Estouteville in 1458—must surely have been a factor. As we shall see, his life story is studded with instances in which his ability to connect even with adversaries affected the course of history. Barcelona accepted Aragonese rule, and in keeping with Rodrigo’s proposal its defenders were granted a general pardon. Juan pledged to uphold the Catalan constitution, and the city’s French commandant was allowed to depart unharmed. Problem solved.

Next, Rodrigo used the authority given him by Sixtus to dispense Ferdinand and Isabella from the canon law that prohibited the marriage of near relations. (The two were cousins in multiple ways, thanks to numerous intermarriages among the royal families of Aragon, Castile, and Portugal.) He thereby validated the marriage that they had entered into three years earlier, when Ferdinand was seventeen and Isabella a year older. Another problem solved.

This left the question of whether Isabella was in fact heir to the throne of Castile, so that her marriage could serve its intended purpose of uniting that kingdom with Aragon. Rodrigo moved on to Castile and to the Madrid court of King Enrique IV. There he found a kind of low-grade war in process between nobles demanding that Isabella be recognized as heir and those supporting the claim of the king’s supposed daughter, Juana. This struggle was fueled by the widespread suspicion that Juana was not Enrique’s daughter at all and therefore not entitled to inherit. Her enemies, and Enrique’s, referred to her as La Beltraneja, a jibe reflecting the belief that she was the product of an adulterous affair between Enrique’s queen and one Beltrán de la Cueva, duke of Albuquerque. Rodrigo found it surprisingly easy to persuade Enrique to repudiate the princess he had always acknowledged as his daughter. The Castilian king, as weak as his sobriquet “Enrique the Impotent” suggested, was willing to acknowledge Isabella as heir in return for nothing more costly than the promotion of his favorite bishop to the Sacred College. Rodrigo arranged that, when in 1473 Pope Sixtus appointed a slate of new cardinals, the list would include Enrique’s favorite. Delighted as he was, Enrique cannot have been more pleased than Juan of Aragon and his son and daughter-in-law.

Before departing Castile, Rodrigo summoned the bishops of Castile and León to meet with him in Segovia. There he launched a program of reform that would, among other things, make Spain the home of some of Europe’s first diocesan seminaries, ending the ordination of priests who knew nothing of Latin or theology. The time that Rodrigo devoted to Church business while in Spain—his instituting of reforms at a number of monasteries being another example—is not easily reconciled with claims that throughout his career he was cynically indifferent to the proper functioning of the Church.

By midsummer 1473 he had been in Spain for more than a year. He had won assurances of royal support for the war against the Turks, and though that support seemed certain to be modest, there was no prospect that by remaining longer he could achieve more. Meanwhile he was receiving troubling reports about developments back in Rome. The most alarming were being sent by Cardinal Jacopo Ammannati-Piccolomini, bishop of Pavia, an adoptive member of the late Pius II’s family and one of the Pieschi who had been too opposed to Cardinal della Rovere to allow a declaration of unanimous election. He begged Rodrigo to hurry back to Rome to help counteract the influence of Pope Sixtus’s nephews. There is irony in his appeals, because at this same time he was writing to others in ways that have contributed to blackening the Borgia name. Having earlier accused Rodrigo of securing Sixtus’s election through “cunning and bribery,” he was now complaining—from Rome, it must be noted—that Rodrigo’s conduct in Spain was “vain, luxurious, ambitious, [and] greedy.” The sad truth appears to be that Ammannati, in many ways an admirable individual, was bitter about the election of Sixtus, about not having been among the legates chosen in December 1471, and about finding himself—not surprisingly, all this considered—out of favor at the papal court. He heaped scorn not only on Rodrigo but on the other legates as well, even the venerable Bessarion, and could be absurdly reckless in his accusations. The credibility of the things he wrote can be measured by his complaint that while in Portugal Rodrigo spent “most of his time with the ladies.” In fact, there is no evidence that Rodrigo ever set foot in Portugal. Nor is it irrelevant that while spreading such slanders Ammannati was imploring their object to return to the Vatican to help counteract what was happening there. If it is not impossible that he would turn to a man he regarded as seriously corrupt for help in fighting corruption, it certainly is odd.

From Segovia Rodrigo returned to Madrid, then to Valencia, where he spent time with King Juan’s clever son Ferdinand, planting the seeds of what would grow into a long-lasting friendship. Early in August he at last paid a visit to his boyhood home, Játiva, where he was received as a hero, next to his uncle Alonso the greatest personage the town had ever produced. His entourage was joined by a contingent of Spanish dignitaries wanting to accompany him back to Rome, and in September they put to sea in a pair of Venetian galleys. On October 10, almost home, they were caught in a storm off the Italian coast near Pisa. In the course of a terrifying night one of the galleys went down with the loss of approximately two hundred passengers and crew. Among them were seventy-five members of Rodrigo’s retinue (the number suggests just how expensive the mission had been), three Spanish bishops, and property and gold (the cardinal’s personal baggage included) with a value of at least thirty thousand ducats. Rodrigo survived thanks to the skill of his vessel’s captain, who saved all hands by intentionally running aground on a sandy beach.

Though Sixtus must have hoped that Rodrigo would return with more support for his crusade than he was able to—and though some of what he had obtained may have gone to the bottom of the sea with the doomed galley—the mission had accomplished great things all the same. The cardinal received a deservedly warm welcome and learned that he had been the most successful of the legates in terms of mustering resources for the war against the Turks. Bessarion had died after being rebuffed by wily old Louis XI of France. Capranica was in poor health after failing to persuade many of the princes of Italy to join the cause, and the jealousies of the eastern European monarchs had made it impossible for Marco Barbo to accomplish anything. Cardinal Carafa had taken a combined force of papal, Venetian, and Neapolitan galleys into the eastern Mediterranean and had had some early success, including the burning of the Ottoman port of Smyrna. But his fleet had then disintegrated as the Neapolitans and Venetians fell to quarreling and sailed off to their respective homes.

Rodrigo, by contrast, had resolved disputes that had long plagued the Iberian church and launched important reforms. He had shown the way to peace in Aragon and in Castile and had helped lay the foundations for eventual unification of the two kingdoms. No less important was the respect and gratitude of the Spanish royals. A few years later, when Isabella gave birth to a son and heir, she and Ferdinand would ask Rodrigo to serve as godfather. This was but a token of the friendship that would bind the houses of Borgia and Trastámara for the next quarter-century, becoming a factor of real significance in the politics not only of Italy but of Europe.

As he took up once again the management of the chancery, Rodrigo saw that Ammannati had not been exaggerating when he wrote of trouble in Rome. The situation was, if anything, more disturbing than the cardinal had warned. The balance of power on which the peace of Italy depended, always fragile and frequently violated, was in danger of falling apart completely. The reasons were numerous and complex, but few were more important than the far-reaching fear and resentment now being aroused by the pope’s lavishing of favors on his relatives. Acceptance of papal nepotism had limits even in Rome, and its beneficiaries were expected to conduct themselves with a measure of restraint, at least early in a reign. Sixtus, however, was conducting himself as though the limits did not exist, his nephews as though restraint was contemptible. They had been feeding ravenously at the pontifical trough almost from the day of their uncle’s election, they gave no sign of being satisfied, and indignation was rising to a level not seen in many generations.

The eldest of the cardinal-nephews, the explosively temperamental Giuliano della Rovere, was, though not yet thirty, archbishop of both Avignon and Bologna, bishop of five dioceses, and abbot of two major monasteries. His cousin Girolamo Riario, not so long ago a small-town fruit peddler but now a member of the titled nobility, was papal enforcer in his role as captain-general of the Vatican soldiery and clearly set on rising higher. But even they were eclipsed by their uncle’s great favorite, Girolamo’s younger brother Cardinal Pietro Riario. Intelligent and cultivated where Girolamo was a Caliban-like bundle of mindless animal energy, Pietro was so loved by Sixtus that the rumor mill declared them to be father and son. Gossip of this kind is understandable, was probably inevitable, and certainly was not uncommon in such circumstances. In the absence of evidence, it can only be noted with interest—and an appropriate measure of skepticism.

Pietro, the pope’s most trusted adviser especially but not only where questions of foreign policy were involved, had become the recipient of an avalanche of nepotistic largesse. He was archbishop of Florence as well as bishop of a handful of cities and head of the great abbey of Saint Ambrose in Milan, and he bore the honorary title of patriarch of Constantinople. His income was stupendous—estimated at between sixty and seventy thousand florins per year—but so inadequate to his way of life that he was piling up debts at a rate that should have alarmed Sixtus. He brought the finest artists to Rome and put them to work on an immense new palace, spent without restraint on everything from racehorses to pearl-covered gowns for his mistresses, and was accompanied on his rounds by five hundred attendants all dressed in scarlet silk.

Italy had rarely seen anything to compare with the arrogance and presumption of these upstarts from the hinterlands, and trouble was inevitable. It began in the spring of 1473—Rodrigo was still in Spain—with a clash over territory between Sixtus and a much younger man of equally strong will, Lorenzo de’ Medici of Florence. In his fourth year as de facto chief of the Florentine republic in spite of being only twenty-four, Lorenzo was well along in his development into the fabled Lorenzo the Magnificent, one of the supreme personalities of the Renaissance. It is difficult to say whether he or Sixtus was most responsible for their conflict. Lorenzo made the first move, entering into an agreement by which Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan was to sell the town of Imola to Florence for a hundred thousand florins. Imola was far from being one of the great urban centers of Italy, but it lay just north and east of the Apennine Mountains and commanded miles of the rich flatlands of the Romagna. It also sat athwart the old Roman highway called the Via Emilia, a lifeline that helped to connect Florence to the Adriatic and the markets of the East. Thus it had a strategic importance out of proportion to its size.

Like the whole of the Romagna Imola owed fealty to Rome, but like much other papal territory it had long ago slipped out of papal control. It was one of the jumble of petty city-states ruled by clans that at best paid lip service to Rome while ruthlessly exploiting their subjects. Sixtus like Paul II had entered upon his reign determined to reestablish control of as much of the Papal States as possible, and again like Paul he gave particular attention to the Romagna. There were good reasons for this: the fertility of its soil made the Romagna an agricultural cornucopia, and many of the region’s warlords had no legitimate claim to the towns they ruled and no grounds for complaint if displaced. It had become a centerpiece of papal policy to displace them if possible, and therefore Imola was at least as important to Rome as to Florence. The sale arranged by Lorenzo de’ Medici was as unthinkable for the pope as control of the city by Rome—or by any state except Florence—was for the Florentines.

When Sixtus ordered Milan’s Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza to cancel the sale on grounds that he had no right to sell what he did not own even if his troops happened to occupy it, what followed was not obedience but prolonged, multisided, and indescribably complicated negotiations. These ended in a new agreement, this one between Milan and Rome with Florence relegated to the sidelines. Imola was to be handed over not to Florence but to the pope, and for forty thousand florins rather than a hundred. Seller and buyer were to be brought together in harmony via the marriage (which had long been under discussion) of Count Girolamo Riario to Galeazzo Maria’s illegitimate daughter Caterina, now all of eleven years old. Such a marriage had become advantageous in a new way: it would allow all parties to pretend that Imola was not being sold at all but was the dowry of the bride-to-be. Florence, neither fooled nor mollified, was soon in an uproar of indignation.

The Vatican treasury did not have forty thousand florins to spare. The Roman branch of the Medici bank having had a monopoly on the papacy’s business since a grateful client became Pope Nicholas V back in 1447, Sixtus found himself applying for a loan to none other than Lorenzo de’ Medici. If he was less than shocked at being turned down, he definitely was infuriated. He broke off relations with the House of Medici and put in its place a rival Florentine establishment, the bank of Francesco de’ Pazzi.

That might have been the end of it, but was only the beginning. When Sixtus sent envoys to assert his authority in the Romagna, hostile local warlords forced them to turn back. The pope then raised the stakes, sending an armed force northward under his nephew Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. The compulsive determination to dominate everyone and everything, to impose his will upon every situation and accept no setbacks, made Giuliano a throwback to the ferocious warrior-cardinals of the past. He was also an abler soldier than his cousin Girolamo, the papal captain-general, because he was more intelligent and courageous. He was thwarted all the same, forced into retreat by a superior Florentine force. Predictably, and with considerable justification, Sixtus again seethed with indignation. Eventually, after considerable to-ing and fro-ing, the pope’s troops succeeded in reaching Imola, and Girolamo Riario was installed as its lord.

Girolamo’s brother Pietro, meanwhile, was occupied with other matters. Still in Milan and on the friendliest of terms with its murderous duke—it was partly because of their friendship that the duke had elected to sell Imola to the pope rather than to Florence—the cardinal and his host were engaged now in hatching a breathtakingly bizarre scheme that if somehow carried to completion might have satisfied the voracious ambitions of both men. Galeazzo Maria was to become king of Lombardy, his coronation performed by the pope. He would then advance on Rome and use his army to install Pietro on the papal throne. (Sixtus would be willing, one must assume, to abdicate in his nephew’s favor to make this possible.) That these things could ever have been accomplished is extremely unlikely; the forces in opposition would have been daunting. In any case the question was never put to the test. Upon returning to Rome, presumably to finalize arrangements with his uncle, Pietro was struck down by fever. In January 1474, after weeks of struggle and amid the usual rumors of poisoning, he died aged twenty-eight. Whether or to what extent Sixtus knew of Pietro’s plan and the part he was expected to play in it remains a mystery.

Pietro’s death left his uncle bereft and a vacuum at the heart of the papal court. With all his excesses the young cardinal had been a comfort to Sixtus, a source of pride and even, at times, of helpful counsel. No greater question faced the pontiff, now in the third year of his reign, than where to look for a new right hand.

There were several satisfactory answers, both in the College of Cardinals and elsewhere.

Sixtus would choose badly.

Background
 
 WAR, ITALIAN STYLE

TO BE A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY POPE WAS TO BE FACED WITH A humiliating and costly form of political impotence: the inability to establish even limited control over those whole provinces of Italy that by law and tradition were the property of the papacy but in fact were in other, rarely friendly, hands.

The resulting conflicts and frustrations are a dark thread running through the reigns of all the century’s popes. Time after time succeeding pontiffs found themselves blocked from their own territories by even the pettiest of lordlings, especially when, as commonly happened, those lordlings were under the protection of more powerful neighbors. We saw this in the reign of Paul II, who was able to take control of his fiefdom of Cesena only because its reigning strongman had died without an heir and the other interested powers were momentarily distracted. We saw also that only the help of Federico da Montefeltro enabled Paul to drive the vicious Anguillara clan from the little domain they had carved out of the Papal States, and that when this same Montefeltro changed sides (in spite of being himself a papal vassal), the pope was rendered helpless.

It was much the same for Sixtus IV, who would never have been able to obtain Imola for his nephew Girolamo if the duke of Milan had not been willing to sell it. What had been given to the popes by emperors was taken from them by gangsters during the years of exile and schism, and after the papacy returned to Rome, those families proved impossible to control and all but impossible to uproot.

To understand the Borgia story it is necessary to understand who these families were, and how they had come to matter as much as they did. Most of them were, by the time the first Borgias arrived in Rome, members of a brotherhood called the condottieri, which means simply that they signed contracts, condotta, to sell their military services in return for hard cash: for gold.

It is appropriate, if less romantic, to call them warlords. Most were lords in a quite literal sense—the rulers, even when they did not bear titles of nobility, of one or more cities or towns. In most cases their rule was brutish and tyrannical, with no basis in law or justice. They spent their lives fighting one another, waging war for pay, or collecting retainers while waiting for the call to battle.

It could be a lucrative line of work, being a condottiere, and it was not necessarily all that dangerous. A good condotta was a thing to be coveted, so fine a source of honor and income that by the fifteenth century breaking into the business had come to be nearly impossible for anyone lacking the right family connections. For anyone not born, that is, into the increasingly exclusive circle of Italian tyrant families.

The world of these families was Italy’s version of the phenomenon that historians refer to as “bastard feudalism.” In its unadulterated form, feudalism was an arrangement by which a king granted land to his nobles, the nobles in turn parceled out their land among knights, and the knights used peasants to farm the parcels. Everyone at every level of this pyramid owed service to whoever stood directly above him and ultimately to the man at the apex, the prince. Part of the price for possession of land, and for protection, was an obligation to report for military service when summoned. This was the only dependable way of raising an armed force where not much money was in circulation. But it became a nuisance to everyone involved as economic life became more sophisticated. Gradually it mutated into the debased form that permitted noblemen, rather than fighting the king’s wars themselves, to send the king a purseful of gold instead.

Things developed differently in Italy. As we saw earlier, feudalism failed to sink its roots as deeply south of the Alps as in the north, and it began to fade away earlier. The development of manufacturing and trade, the emergence of lively urban centers, and the absence of even a vestige of national government combined to create more opportunities for the freelance fighting man in Italy than elsewhere, and in ways that few ordinary Italians could have welcomed. When German kings began to invade the sunny lands of the south, they did so at the head of armies that seemed to the onlooking locals (no doubt accurately enough) to be not much of an improvement over the barbarian tribes that had overrun their forebears a thousand years before.

Inevitably, amid the disorder created by these invasions, troops of battle-hardened foreigners found themselves at loose ends but unwilling to return to the cold and backward north when the emperors who had brought them to Italy were obliged to go home. Armed and unemployed in a rich and fragmented country, they rather naturally took up the business of pillaging. They came together to form companies that sometimes numbered more than ten thousand men, enough to make them a threat to the largest city-states. By electing their officers and providing opportunities for quick wealth that would have been inconceivable in any other line of work, they achieved surprisingly high levels of cohesion. Of course they left devastation behind them wherever they went. Their opportunism and ruthlessness are illustrated by an episode of 1329, when a force of eight hundred German cavalry deserted from the army of Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria and independently laid siege to the city of Lucca. The man sent by the emperor to order them to return defected himself instead and was rewarded with election as their leader. Upon capturing Lucca they looted it of everything of value, and then sold it to Genoa for thirty thousand florins.

One of the most notorious early captains, Werner von Urslingen, is said to have displayed on his breastplate the motto “Enemy of God, of pity, and of mercy”—and to have earned it in years of savagely pillaging the Romagna, Tuscany, and Umbria. For a while he sold the services of the force he had created, the notorious Great Company, to the pope. When that proved insufficiently lucrative, he switched to ravaging the Papal States.

Another fourteenth-century legend, Ezzelino da Romano (of German extraction despite his name), became so notorious for his atrocities that, two and a half centuries after his death, the poet Ariosto wrote that he was “believed to be the son of a demon.” He was not devoid of redeeming qualities, however. He was the only commander to remain loyal to Frederick II as that extraordinary emperor was brought low by the pope, and he was generous in his treatment of vanquished foes. It appears likely that the most horrifying of the stories he inspired—accounts of his monstrous treatment of children, for example—were invented by his enemies. The moral caliber of those enemies, and the standards of conduct prevailing at the time, might fairly be measured by what happened after Ezzelino was captured and subjected to a slow, agonizing death. His brother and partner Alberico, also captured, was forced to watch as his wife and two daughters were burned alive. All six of his sons were then executed, their bodies chopped into pieces and scattered. Finally, ropes were tied to Alberico’s extremities and to horses that pulled him apart. If the brothers were monsters, their enemies were no better.

The most successful of the early mercenary chieftains was John Hawkwood, the one Englishman to rise to prominence fighting in Italy for pay. Of humble origins and probably illiterate, Hawkwood fought in France under King Edward III in the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War. He is believed to have been about forty when he entered Italy and became a member of the Great Company. In the early 1360s he was elected commander of its successor the White Company, and he spent the next thirty years engaged in almost every significant conflict in Italy. He and his company regularly changed employers, not infrequently signing on with a patron’s enemy. They would accept a condotta from one city and then take money from that city’s enemies in return for not attacking. Hawkwood came to be honored all the same, perhaps in part because he never made the mistake that led to the ruin of Ezzelino and many others: he never tried to carve out a principality for himself. He married into the Visconti dynasty of Milan, and when he died, the city of Florence buried him in state in its cathedral, where his monument can be seen to this day. King Richard II asked for the return of his body to England.

By early in the fifteenth century the condottieri were becoming not just freebooting mercenaries but instruments of governance, and were more respectable as a result. It was another time of severe instability, with city-states large and small both threatened by external enemies and weakened from within as rival factions fought for control. Many of the cities had long been organized as communes, with substantial numbers of the citizens having at least some voice in government. Now, however, and with increasing frequency, powerful individuals (men both ambitious and rich, usually) were using the pervasive uncertainty as an excuse to take command, impose order on their own terms, and set themselves up as tyrants. As early as the thirteenth century, Dante had complained that “the cities of Italy are full of tyrants.” By the fifteenth century tyranny was the rule.

Typically, upon seizing power a new tyrant would disarm the citizenry. This was not as unpopular a measure as one might suppose; random bloodshed stopped as swords and daggers disappeared, so that the change was not greatly deplored. Still, the need to maintain order and defend against invaders remained, and even leaders as supposedly enlightened as the Medici found it advisable to suppress dissent. The tyrants needed soldiers to do such work but, being usurpers, most found it impossible to trust the people they ruled. And so it became the practice to sign outsiders to condotta. This was made easier by Italy’s early development of a money economy. The employment of condottieri became policy even in such republics as Venice and Florence, partly because the merchants and bankers who dominated these cities had no wish to go soldiering themselves. The papacy too made frequent use of condotta. The lure of cash had a further effect, causing many tyrants to become condottieri themselves and see to it that their sons were trained to take up military careers. As the warlord families intermarried in an endless and largely futile quest for dependable allies, non-Italians found it impossible to win contracts. Condotta became an oblique way of paying tribute to a feared warlord—of buying his neutrality if not his friendship. Many ruling families became dependent on their earnings as mercenaries to cover the costs of running their own little states.

The mid-fifteenth century produced the greatest of the condottieri. The most admired was a figure we have already encountered more than once because he was employed in almost every conflict of consequence during his lifetime. This was Federico da Montefeltro, scion of the dynasty that had long ruled the remote hilltop city of Urbino. The eagerness of other cities to hire him generated the fantastic sums with which he turned Urbino into an architectural showplace of international renown, established one of the greatest libraries and most brilliant courts of the century, and raised his family to ducal status.

Even more spectacularly successful, and by a wide margin the most feared, was Francesco Sforza. Though not born into a ruling family, he gained admittance to the brotherhood of condottieri while still half-grown by virtue of being the son of one of the leading mercenary commanders of the early 1400s, Muzio Attendolo. In the course of his own impressive career, as a kind of early experiment in branding, this Attendolo had given himself the name Sforza, meaning “force.” Francesco, twenty-three when his father drowned crossing a river during one of their campaigns, took charge of the family business and soon showed himself to be a general of immense courage and rare ability. In the manner of his profession he changed sides whenever it was advantageous to do so, first fighting against Pope Eugenius IV and then contracting to work for him. Later, in the service of Venice, he inflicted a painful defeat on Milan, after which he married the sixteen-year-old only child of Milan’s ruler, the last Visconti duke. When his father-in-law died, Francesco laid claim to the ducal title. To win it he had to fend off challenges from the German emperor (whose fiefdom Milan was), the French duke of Orléans (whose mother was a Visconti), and the military might of Venice. In succeeding he became the onlycondottiere to found a ruling dynasty.

It might go without saying, in light of all this, that there was nothing remotely demeaning about accepting employment under a condotta. The contrary was more often true: demanding a contract could be a kind of blackmail, a levy imposed by the strong upon the less strong. On the other hand, employment as a condottiere, even success as one, was no proof of ability or courage. The nature of the system meant that commanders rarely had reason to care passionately about whatever side they had been hired to fight for, or to put themselves in danger. Machiavelli would identify this problem, and the cynical self-interest that it engendered, as one reason for Italy’s inability to defend itself against invaders. Warfare in Italy, as long as it was conducted by Italians only, was often a ritual affair in which the risks even to combatants were kept within narrow limits and harm to civilians was often a thing to be avoided. Statistically, the warlords stood in far greater risk of being murdered by their own relatives than of dying in battle.

All this would change when the foreign armies came.

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