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Sixtus IV’s priorities were not changed by the death of his nephew Pietro. He was still determined to start bringing the Papal States under control, pledged to oppose the advance of the Turks, and passionately, obsessively, blindly committed to lifting his family into the highest ranks of Italian society.
The clarity of his goals and the strength of his will, however, were not matched by his talents as a strategist. He needed help not just in the execution but in the formulation of policy—in deciding how to get what he wanted. There were also tricky questions having to do with what he wanted most, because fighting the Turks and satisfying his young kinsmen proved to be not quite compatible objectives. Among the most obvious possible sources of counsel was Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. In his early forties now, with nearly two decades of experience as one of the Vatican’s top men, he had a deserved reputation as a hard worker and an intelligent, capable manager. His affability and even temperament had made him a well-liked member of the Sacred College, and his achievements in Spain had reinforced the good opinion that Sixtus had always had of him. Since returning to the papal court, however, Rodrigo had found himself eclipsed, first by Pietro Riario and then, after Pietro’s death, by his cousin Giuliano della Rovere. Though the pope’s nephews were by no means a united force—Giuliano allied himself with the Colonna, for example, while the Riario brothers encouraged Sixtus to make war on them—the conflicts among them served only to increase their visibility and deepen the shadows to which Rodrigo found himself relegated. The death of Pietro improved his situation somewhat, making it impossible for a bereft pope not to increase his reliance on a veteran vice-chancellor whose judgment he respected. Rodrigo remained a power in the great bureaucracy that was the Curia as well as in consistory, but a power of not quite the first rank. The seat at the pope’s right hand went not to him, not even to Sixtus’s strong-willed and gifted nephew Giuliano, but to the worst choice available, the late Pietro’s conspicuously untalented brother Girolamo, now lord of Imola.
Trouble did not follow quickly from the pope’s decision, however. Instead there ensued an Indian summer of quiet and stability for Rome and for Italy, the last tranquil interlude of Cardinal Borgia’s life. The wars with the Turks raged on, but so far out on the fringes of Europe that the monarchs of the West usually found it possible to ignore them. In Moldavia, at the eastern end of faraway Romania and therefore seemingly in another world, the amazing Stephen III was annually beating back invasions by Mehmed II. In 1476 his neighbor Vlad III Dracula met his death in a last courageous stand in Wallachia, but his passing attracted little notice in Italy. The Italians paid somewhat more attention when the Turks captured the Black Sea port of Caffa, a crucial link in the chain of commercial colonies that Genoa had painstakingly put together in the East over the centuries. But nothing came of Sixtus’s call for a counteroffensive, and the Turks met little opposition as they fanned out from Caffa to take control of the whole Crimean coast.
In the spring following the fall of Caffa a flood of unprecedented magnitude buried much of Rome under a blanket of stinking mud and brought on an outbreak of plague that by summer had decimated the population and sent the pope and his court fleeing to Viterbo. Months later Milan was shaken when the cruelties of the psychopathic sadist Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza caused him to be assassinated by desperate subjects who were destroyed in their turn. Galeazzo Maria’s heir was a seven-year-old child, his son Gian Galeazzo, and though the boy’s mother Bona of Savoy attempted to take charge, she was pushed aside by her brother-in-law, the murdered duke’s brother Ludovico. Proclaiming himself regent, Ludovico restored order so quickly that none of Milan’s neighbors had time to exploit the situation.
Sixtus brought Rodrigo out of the background when King Ferrante of Naples announced that he was marrying his first cousin, a daughter of his uncle King Juan of Aragon. Ferrante, one of the most vicious rulers of his violent times, now a fifty-four-year-old widower with three grown sons, was perhaps not the bridegroom of a twenty-two-year-old princess’s dreams. But he and his relatives in Spain required careful handling, and the obvious choice to take charge of the marital formalities was the cardinal who already had the friendship of Aragon. In August 1477 Rodrigo traveled to Naples, bearing with him the powers of a plenipotentiary envoy. There he crowned Ferrante’s bride, conferred a papal blessing on the marriage, and, as in Spain earlier, attended to various matters of Church business.
Sixtus and Girolamo Riario meanwhile nursed their ambitions for the Romagna, probing for signs of weakness in the neighboring states. In so doing they inflamed the suspicions of the Florentines, fearful as always of allowing the Romagna to fall into unfriendly hands. In 1477 Girolamo was allowed to consummate his marriage to the now fourteen-year-old, and strikingly beautiful, Caterina Sforza. After triumphantly parading her through the streets of Imola, he took her to Rome, so as to have ready access to the pope’s ear. He made no secret of wanting to rule more than Imola, and Sixtus encouraged his ambitions. Florence for its part made clear that it would not stand by idly if the two of them tried to expand their Romagna holdings beyond Imola. There was fear on both sides, and fear led as usual to bad decisions.
When Lorenzo de’ Medici worked out a defensive alliance with Milan and Venice, the two great powers to his north, Pope Sixtus denounced it as an act of aggression. But in the mind of Girolamo Riario, a mind incapable of subtleties yoked to a spirit incapable of restraint, this was a problem with a simple solution. Florence needed a new regime, one more understanding of the pope’s rights and needs. The Medici, specifically the meddlesome Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano, had to be replaced. Then everything would be fine. And so was hatched the Pazzi Conspiracy, in which Girolamo plotted with the banker Jacopo de’ Pazzi, the archbishop of Pisa, and others to murder the Medici brothers while they were hearing mass in Florence’s great Duomo. Here again fear was the driving force: Lorenzo’s refusal to tolerate challenges to his authority, coupled with his resentment of the loss of the Vatican’s banking business, had caused the Pazzi to suspect that he was planning their destruction and to conclude that their only hope of survival was to destroy the Medici first. The archbishop too was spurred by fear mixed with thwarted ambition. For three years Lorenzo, seeing him as an agent of the pope, had been refusing to allow him to enter Pisa and take up his duties there. The archbishop was certain that if he tried, he would pay with his life.
Rodrigo knew nothing of the plot. Girolamo, aware that the vice-chancellor had no respect for him and had long been on friendly terms with Lorenzo, made certain that he knew nothing. Sixtus on the other hand was informed, in delicate terms and strict confidence, that certain steps were being taken to clear the Medici out of Florence; not even his favorite nephew would have dared to keep such a momentous undertaking from him. But when told that it might become necessary to kill Lorenzo and his brother (Girolamo pretended that none of the plotters wanted that to happen), Sixtus forbade the shedding of blood. That his problems with the Medici had engendered in him an icy hatred for the entire clan is not to be doubted, and he would have celebrated a change of regimes in Florence. But none of this stopped him from calling Girolamo “fool” when asked if the assassination of Lorenzo would be forgiven, or from repeating what he had said earlier: “I will not have anyone killed.”
The plot went forward and became the fiasco of the century. When the assassins attacked, young Giuliano de’ Medici was all but cut to bits, but Lorenzo escaped with a knife wound in his neck. Supporters of the murderers ran through the streets of Florence shouting “libertà! libertà!” but got nothing like the enthusiastic reception they expected. Within minutes the dead bodies of various members of the Pazzi family, the archbishop of Pisa, and the two priests who had done the stabbing were hanging in the city’s central piazza. A general bloodbath would have ensued if Lorenzo had not intervened. Among those saved was the newest of Sixtus’s nephew-cardinals, Raffaele Sansoni Riario, whose stop at Florence en route to Rome had been used by the conspirators to lure the Medici to the Duomo. A grandson of one of Sixtus IV’s sisters, born into poverty like so many of the pope’s relatives and adopting the Riario surname because of its new prestige, this boy, just sixteen, was one of the youngest cardinals in history. He had known nothing of the plot, and stood at the Duomo’s altar in a state of stupefaction as the brothers came under attack. Lorenzo took him into protective custody and later provided guards to escort him safely to Rome. It would be said that over the next forty years, which he spent as one of Rome’s wealthiest cardinals and greatest patrons of the arts, his face never lost the haunted expression it acquired that Sunday in Florence.
Sixtus’s response to the debacle was perhaps the most ignoble episode in what was turning into a deeply disgraceful reign. He denounced the killing not of Giuliano de’ Medici but of the archbishop of Pisa, on grounds that even obviously guilty clerics had to be handed over to the Church for judgment. He summoned Lorenzo to Rome, and when his order was not obeyed Lorenzo was excommunicated—a punishment supposed to entail eternal damnation. When Florence’s city council refused to hand its leader over, the whole city was put under an interdict, which meant that none of its priests were to make the sacraments available to the citizenry: no weddings or baptisms, no mass or communion, no last rites or burials. When this too had no effect, the Florentines forcing even the most reluctant of their priests to carry on as usual, Sixtus declared that Rome and Florence were at war. He was immediately joined by Naples: Ferrante saw an opportunity to seize some Florentine territory at little cost or risk. He and Sixtus found a third ally in the Tuscan city-state of Siena, which always welcomed a chance to weaken its bigger and much-feared neighbor Florence.
Fear of Sixtus’s ambitions brought Venice and Milan in on Florence’s side. They were followed by Ferrara, Bologna, and Rimini, all of them papal fiefs and therefore now in rebellion against their overlord. An indignant Sixtus then persuaded Genoa to rebel against Milan and recruited companies of Swiss mercenaries to attack the Sforzas from the north. Thanks to Girolamo Riario and his reckless scheming, the whole of Italy was at war, almost all the northern powers arrayed against Rome. If Sixtus was distressed to learn that summer that the capital of Albania had fallen to the Turks, and that the Turks had also taken possession of the Friuli region at the northern end of the Adriatic and were beginning to encroach on Austria, he no longer had the means even to try to respond.
In Italy, however, alliances were made to be broken, and to be winning today was almost an assurance that one would be losing tomorrow. Milan’s new strongman, the regent Ludovico Sforza, decided that it would be to his advantage to break with Venice and Florence and join Naples and Rome. When a hard-pressed Venice reacted to this betrayal by abandoning its sixteen-year war with the Turks, signing a treaty by which it surrendered strategic outposts in the eastern Mediterranean and consented to pay Constantinople a hefty annual tribute, the course of Italian history was changed in ways few could have foreseen. Having accepted a position subordinate to the Turks in parts of the world where it had once been supreme, Venice began looking to the Italian mainland as its best—its last—opportunity for an expanding sphere of influence. It became a more volatile, more aggressive element in the age-old contest for primacy among Italy’s leading states, because it no longer saw any reason to accept the status quo put in place by the Italian League a generation before. It saw its only choices as expansion or stagnation, and few ways of expanding except at the expense of its Italian neighbors, the neighbors that were currently its allies included.
Sixtus’s war dragged drearily, pointlessly on. He was urged to end it by the College of Cardinals, the Holy Roman emperor, and the kings of France and Hungary, but paid them no heed. He was encouraged to fight on only by his nephew Girolamo and by Ferrante of Naples, both of whom had narrow and purely selfish motives. Lorenzo de’ Medici meanwhile was himself under heavy pressure, his support among the people of Florence eroding as the war brought increasing hardship. His position became even more difficult in November 1479, when after a siege of more than half a year the Neapolitans captured the town of Colle di Val d’Elsa just thirty miles from Florence. This cut the Florentines off from one of their primary sources of food and put them in danger of famine.
Lorenzo bet everything on a final throw of the dice. He raised sixty thousand florins by mortgaging much of what he owned, boarded a galley at Livorno, and proceeded to Naples. There he delivered himself into the hands of his enemy Ferrante—an act as brave as it was desperate. In departing Florence, Lorenzo accepted the very real possibility that the city’s exhausted and demoralized citizens might abandon him for the sake of peace. And in going to Naples he was putting himself at the mercy of a truly sinister man. On an earlier and somewhat similar occasion, when visited by a mercenary commander who had long been his partner in crime, Ferrante had entertained his guest lavishly for weeks before abruptly having him strangled. The murder was entirely characteristic of the Neapolitan king.
Lorenzo was no fool, however, and though his courage in going to Naples cannot be disputed, the venture was not a blind leap. He had friends at the Neapolitan court and in fact had been encouraged by Ferrante’s son Alfonso to undertake his daring journey. Also, he was a head of state in effect if not quite officially, not some troublemaking soldier of fortune, and so was unlikely to be put to death. Ferrante was, as it turned out, fascinated by his charismatic young visitor. The two talked frequently and at length, and Lorenzo used his borrowed florins to put on flamboyant displays of princely generosity, winning the applause of the Neapolitan public by buying the freedom of a hundred galley slaves and giving each of them ten florins and a new suit of clothes. He appeared to be bringing Ferrante around to the idea that Florence, as a friend of France and Venice, would be a more valuable ally than the pope, but whenever he proposed an alliance, the king became evasive. It was only by pretending to give up and actually setting off for home that Lorenzo was able to extract a treaty from Ferrante at last. When this became known in Florence, Lorenzo was once again a hero.
But Sixtus remained immovable, and his shabby little war dragged on. Nothing was accomplished by either side, though in the summer of 1480 Girolamo Riario was able to use his uncle’s army to pry the town of Forlì out of the hands of the squabbling heirs of its last Ordelaffi lord. With this one stroke—barely related to the wider war—he doubled his holdings in the Romagna. That wider war might have gone on indefinitely if reality had not suddenly intruded. It arrived with the news that a seaborne Turkish army, wandering the Mediterranean after unsuccessfully attacking the island of Rhodes, had come ashore on Naples’s east coast and captured the city of Otranto. Almost half of Otranto’s twenty-two thousand inhabitants had been massacred, many of them after being raped or tortured, and the survivors had been taken away as slaves. Both Otranto’s governor and its aged archbishop had been sawed in half alive.
The Turks were in Italy. This shocking development changed everything, and immediately. Ferrante begged the pope for assistance, warning that if it was not forthcoming he was prepared to come to terms with the invaders. Sixtus responded with a shipment of gold, a special tithe on the churches of Naples and the Papal States, and an assessment of one ducat on every household in the territories he controlled. He also extracted pledges totaling 150,000 ducats from the cardinals. The money thus raised financed the recruitment of troops and a new crash program of galley construction, and even the princes of northern Europe promised to send help. Preparations got under way for moving the papal court to France if the Turks advanced on Rome.
Having been brought to his senses, Sixtus removed the interdict from Florence and restored Lorenzo to good standing in the Church. The Turks at Otranto were being brought under siege when, at the start of the summer of 1481, another bolt of stunning news arrived. Mehmed II was dead. The sultan had been only forty-nine years old and brimmed with vitality almost to the end, making this one of the rare instances when rumors of poisoning may have been justified. One suspect, an Italian-born convert to Islam who served as the sultan’s physician, was put to death. An equally plausible possibility, Mehmed’s son Bayezid, was too powerful to be accused. Whatever its cause, the death was celebrated with the ringing of church bells in Naples and Rome. And it really did change things drastically. The Ottoman Empire found itself caught in a contest between two claimants to the throne, Bayezid and his brother Cem, and when the former quickly prevailed, he showed himself to be both less belligerent than his father and less interested in Italy. The vast territories he already controlled were presenting him with an abundance of headaches, a war with Persia among them, and so he both revised the treaty that his father had imposed upon Venice, making its terms less onerous and the Venetians grateful, and pulled his troops out of Otranto. The withdrawal was hailed as a great victory for the Christians but should be seen as a shift in strategy on the part of the Turks.
Be that as it may, this was without question a moment of weakness and indecision for the Ottoman Empire. A Christian counteroffensive might have achieved great things—might have retaken Albania and Greece, even conceivably Constantinople. But when Sixtus proposed an advance on Albania, no one else was interested. He therefore turned his attention back to Italy and to matters in which he might better have never become involved. Mere months after the death of Mehmed, the Italians were once again at war with one another. And for no better reason than Girolamo’s hunger to become lord of the whole of the Romagna, and the pope’s desire for revenge.
The great obstacle to the pope’s freedom of action in the Romagna and on the Adriatic coast was Venice. It needed to be neutralized if the Romagna was ever to be subdued, but it was far too mighty for this to be accomplished by force. Diplomacy was required—bribery, really—and so Sixtus offered the Venetians a stupendous prize. He said they could have the duchy of Ferrara, which lay just to the southwest of Venice and for centuries had been a papal fief ruled by the House of Este, one of the oldest and proudest families in Europe. The price, of course, was that Venice must become Rome’s friend and ally once again. To do so it would have to take on the dirty job of defeating Ferrara’s duke, a tough and experienced soldier who had long been making himself a nuisance by supporting Lorenzo de’ Medici and refusing to pay the annual tribute that he owed, as a vassal, to Rome. He was certain to put up a hard fight, but if the Venetians were not exactly delighted by the prospect of taking him on, they certainly were willing. This was an opportunity to vastly expand, at a single stroke, their holdings on the mainland. And the expansion would come with a papal blessing, which would cloak it in legitimacy. Venice accepted the pope’s offer, its rivals were outraged when they learned of the deal, and Italy again went up in flames. Again the cause lay entirely in Rome.
In the protracted and terrible conflict that would be called the War of Ferrara, Rome and Venice were opposed not only by Ferrara itself but by Naples, Milan, Florence, and smaller city-states including Bologna, Mantua, Roberto Malatesta’s Rimini, and Federico da Montefeltro’s Urbino. All were convinced that their safety required them to resist what they saw as the pope’s unprovoked betrayal of one of his own vassals. The complications that ensued were often bizarre and included even more than the usual number of inexplicable surprises. With the violence at its height Roberto Malatesta and Pope Sixtus were somehow reconciled. Malatesta was given command of Venice’s army, inflicted a ruinous defeat on a Neapolitan force that had invaded the Papal States, and was received in Rome as a hero just days before dying there of malaria. His father-in-law Montefeltro died on the same day, so that two of Italy’s best generals simultaneously disappeared from the scene. Most bizarrely of all, Sixtus then broke with Venice and teamed up with Ferrante, probably because he felt endangered by the latter’s repeated attacks on the Papal States.
It is a measure of the irresponsibility of nearly all the participants in this lunatic conflict that Ferrante hired fifteen hundred Turkish cavalry to fight his fellow Italians on Italian soil. Most irresponsible of all, and also incompetent, was Girolamo Riario. At one crucial point, with enemy troops threatening, he used the main altar of a Roman church as a dicing table on which to gamble away his army’s payroll. Eventually, having proved even to himself that he was incapable of accomplishing anything on conventional fields of battle, he launched a gratuitously savage campaign aimed at the destruction of the Colonna and their allies. As this was largely a matter of forcing the Colonna out of their strongholds inside Rome, the streets of the papal capital were engulfed in the general mayhem.
By the summer of 1484 almost everyone understood that what was happening was madness. The exceptions, inevitably, were Sixtus and Girolamo, whose obsession now was to subdue and humiliate Venice. They could not be persuaded to negotiate, and so their weary allies entered into talks with Venice without consulting them. The result, the Peace of Bagnolo, ended the conflict on terms so unfavorable to Rome that the Venetians celebrated it as a victory. Sixtus when he learned of it was horrified—convinced somehow that the defeat of Venice had been near. In fact the settlement was deficient in serious ways, failing to reflect the realities of how power was distributed among the Italian states at the time. It planted seeds that would produce further disorder in years to come. If that outcome was a vindication of Sixtus’s disgust, he did not live to see it. Less than a week after the signing of the peace he was dead of fever—or, as was widely said, of rage at the smashing of his dreams. His great error—one is tempted to say his besetting sin—had been to attach those dreams to his nephew Girolamo, a man whose every act had shown him to be unworthy of trust.
Rome exploded in an orgy of fresh violence upon learning of the pontiff’s passing. Mobs plundered the palaces of the Riarii, the Colonna came flooding back intent on vengeance, and Girolamo, in company with his Orsini allies, marched toward the city hoping to take control before anyone else could. As he approached, his young wife Caterina Sforza assumed command of the Castel Sant’Angelo in her husband’s name. The cardinals, meanwhile, were preparing for the burial of Sixtus and the opening of a conclave. When they issued orders for the Colonna to leave Rome and for Girolamo and the Orsini to stay out, civil war seemed imminent. The situation was defused by Marco Barbo, an able and serious-minded young cardinal who owed his red hat to his uncle Paul II. He persuaded the Orsini, the Colonna, and Girolamo to obey the Sacred College’s instructions, averting a bloody showdown.
Caterina Sforza Riario, disgusted to learn that her husband had turned back rather than bringing reinforcements, surrendered the Castel to the College of Cardinals in return for a payment of four thousand ducats. She then returned with Girolamo to Forlì, unofficial capital of their mini-empire in the Romagna. The Orsini and Colonna withdrew to their lairs in the hill country outside Rome. The city became subdued enough for the election to proceed.
This was Rodrigo’s fourth conclave. He was in his fifties now, old enough to be taken seriously as a candidate, and though his foreign birth remained a disadvantage, it was increasingly counterbalanced by the accomplishments of his undeniably distinguished career. His credentials could not have been better—he was now both dean of the Sacred College and prior of the cardinal-bishops—and in 1484’s first round of balloting he received several votes. Giuliano della Rovere also showed strength in spite of being barely in his forties and having little experience as an administrator or a diplomat; the presence in the college of three cousins gave him a rock-solid base of support. The leader by an impressive margin, however, proved to be Marco Barbo. His strong showing reflected both the respect of his colleagues and their gratitude for his success in preventing a disaster just days before. But the Venetian origins that had helped to elect his uncle Paul II were now a major handicap. Fear of Venice’s new hunger for territory, along with resentment of the city’s separate peace with the Turks and the benefits that had come to it through the Peace of Bagnolo, ran high enough among the electors to stop him from increasing his vote.
That evening Rodrigo Borgia and Giuliano della Rovere, both of them controlling enough votes to act as power brokers, met to consider their options. They had no interest in helping each other to the throne, which put Rodrigo out of the running. Della Rovere for his part had no chance because he was Sixtus’s nephew, too young, and a disagreeable character to boot. After some discussion the pair of them agreed to join in supporting an unobjectionable nonentity named Giovanni Battista Cibo, a tall, handsome, and mildly genial son of Genoa. Cibo’s roots contributed importantly to his appeal: Genoa had grown prosperous through seafaring, though never as rich or powerful as Venice, and the long rivalry between the two states had cost the Genoese much and taught them to regard the Venetians as a malignant force. Many cardinals were willing, in 1484, to embrace almost any enemy of Venice as their friend. Cibo was elected without difficulty the next morning and took the throne as Pope Innocent VIII—a name that can sound absurd to modern ears. Those who had hoped for a different result voiced the customary complaints about corruption—Rodrigo was just one of several cardinals accused of having sold their votes—but credible evidence is entirely lacking.
The selection of Cibo turned out to be better for della Rovere than for Rodrigo. The new pope was by no means unfriendly to the vice-chancellor, in the postelection dispersal of benefices appointing him administrator and therefore beneficiary of a major Valencian monastery. Other signs of favor followed: in an early bull Innocent described Rodrigo as “constantly at work and afraid of no kind of labor,” praised him for his prudence, acuteness, mature counsel, and loyalty, and stated that he “fills first place in the order of our venerable brethren of the Sacred College.” It was obvious nonetheless that in the most important matters Innocent was della Rovere’s man. This should have surprised no one, it having been della Rovere who persuaded his uncle to make the compliant Cibo a cardinal back in 1473. For Italy the result was going to be further tragedy, and as before it would be brought about by greed, vindictiveness, and rank stupidity.
The tragedy opened this time in an essentially trivial way, with a visit to Rome by Ferrante’s son and heir, Alfonso duke of Calabria. Though approaching forty, an able enough soldier when not in the grip of his occasional fits of panic, Alfonso proved to be an absurdly ham-handed envoy. He so offended the papal court with his boorishness and arrogance that he returned home having accomplished nothing except the alienation of Innocent and Giuliano della Rovere alike. Thus, when Alfonso later persuaded his father to launch an attack on the chronically troublesome barons of Naples, Cardinal della Rovere demanded that the pope weigh in on the side of the barons. Though Rodrigo counseled patience, Innocent followed della Rovere’s instructions. Reasons of self-protection once again impelled other powers to let themselves be drawn in, and another bloody mess ensued. Things did not go well for Rome, Innocent quickly lost his enthusiasm for military adventures, and the result was a settlement in which Ferrante received bits and pieces of the southernmost Papal States and in return promised amnesty for his rebellious nobles. Nothing could be more characteristic of Ferrante and his son than the nonchalance with which they violated this promise at the first opportunity, butchering as many of the barons as they could get their hands on and seizing their lands and castles.
The effects of this short war were far-reaching and significant. Cardinal della Rovere, because he had drawn Innocent into an unnecessary conflict that cost much and ended in humiliation for Rome, lost his influence at the papal court. The resentment that he had long directed at Rodrigo Borgia, perhaps because he had been kept on as Sixtus’s vice-chancellor in spite of not being a member of the family, turned into a hard and enduring hatred. The surviving barons of Naples, who with good reason had always feared and distrusted Ferrante, began to look far to the north for deliverance. They sent envoys first to Milan, then to Hungary, and finally and most fatefully, as time would show, to France. They told all who would listen that Ferrante had no right to the Neapolitan throne and should be unseated. All these developments would bear toxic fruit.
The rest of Innocent’s reign was a sordid affair. He had two grown children (not sixteen as has often been said), both of them illegitimate but born in his youth before he took holy orders, so that their existence was not really a scandal. He did create scandal, however, by putting the Vatican and its treasury at the service of his offspring. The papal palace became the scene of lavish festivities when the pope’s granddaughter was married to a grandson of Ferrante, and his son Franceschetto to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s daughter. This Franceschetto was a singularly worthless character, dissolute, spineless, and evidently somewhat dim. Once, after losing fourteen thousand ducats gambling with Cardinal Raffaele Riario, he went crying to his father that he had been cheated. It was partly to finance the profligacy of his dependents that Innocent dragged the papacy to new depths of financial corruption, putting more and more offices up for auction—new positions were created solely for the purpose of being sold—and creating a special bank for the sale of pardons. Rulers from Naples to France took advantage of his weakness to encroach on the Church’s property and prerogatives.
It was in the year of Franceschetto’s marriage that Girolamo Riario came to his fittingly violent end. He and his wife Caterina, after retiring to the Romagna, had imposed on their two little city-states of Imola and Forlì painfully high taxes and the kind of savagely arbitrary rule that was typical of the region. One April evening, while idling with cronies in his newly built Forlì palace, Girolamo was set upon by a gang of assassins led by the captain of his personal guard, Cecco Orsi. While her husband was dying under a flurry of knife blows, his body stripped naked and thrown out a window onto the piazza below, Caterina was warned of the danger. She barricaded herself and her children—in a decade of marriage she had borne six sons and a daughter—in her bedchamber. She was eventually made a prisoner but persuaded Orsi and his brothers and their fellow conspirators that if they allowed her to enter Forlì’s rocca or fortress, which had refused to surrender to her husband’s killers, she could get its commandant to open the gates. Once inside, however, she mounted the battlements and hurled down curses on the Orsi and their comrades. One of the most colorful stories of the Italian Renaissance—not certainly true, but endlessly repeated because so typical of the beautiful and ferocious Caterina—tells of how, when her enemies threatened to kill her children, she retorted that she could make more children and lifted her skirts to display the equipment that gave her the ability to do so.
She was soon rescued by troops dispatched from Milan, where her cousin was duke and her uncle Ludovico was regent, and from Bologna, whose ruling Bentivoglio clan welcomed the opportunity to make clear that in the Romagna there could be no tolerance of rebellion. Caterina, coming into her own now, took personal charge of punishing the conspirators. Those who could be caught were publicly tortured before being executed, their houses leveled, and their wives and children crowded into dungeons. The assassin Cecco Orsi’s aged father, who had no involvement in the plot and when he learned of it cursed his sons for failing to kill Caterina and her entire brood when they had the chance, was forced to witness the demolition of his palace before being handed over to the butchers.
Caterina, claiming to act in the name of her eldest son, took up the reins of power in Forlì and Imola and the miles of rich farmland that came with them. She became Italy’s only female ruler, so strong of will and so cold-bloodedly ruthless that before long she became legendary as a true virago—a woman with all the characteristics of the most formidable males. She did not mourn her husband, who in addition to being a sadist had been fat and lazy and as cowardly as he was stupid. The character of their marriage is suggested, chillingly, in something that Caterina wrote before his murder: “You cannot imagine the life I lead with my husband. It has often caused me to envy those who die.” Now she was free and answerable to no one. If it is true as has been alleged that Lorenzo de’ Medici was involved in the plot to kill Girolamo—by 1488 the last participant in the Pazzi Conspiracy still living—or if Pope Innocent encouraged the Orsi as has also been suggested, Caterina appears neither to have cared nor to have shown any resentment. The purging of all opposition in Forlì was sufficient to her needs, personally as well as politically.
As Innocent’s reign limped to its sorry conclusion, he chose Tomás de Torquemada, nephew of the famed cardinal-theologian encountered earlier, to be inquisitor general in Spain. At about the same time he granted indulgences to all who would contribute to a war of extermination on a puritanical sect known as the Waldensians in central Europe. He went through the motions of urging the powers of Europe to mount a campaign against the Turks but was not heartbroken when the conflicts of the Hapsburgs of Germany with Hungary and France made any such venture impossible. The extent of his commitment to resisting the Turkish threat can be inferred from his willingness, in 1489, to accept Sultan Bayezid II’s offer of 120,000 crowns plus an annual stipend of 45,000 ducats to keep his brother Cem in the custody of the Vatican. In effect he was agreeing to run a kind of prison-hotel for displaced Ottoman princes.
Almost the only responsible ruler in all Italy was Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose exertions to maintain a stable balance of power had defused one explosive situation after another. By age forty he had been the chief executive in Florence through two difficult decades. He was worn out, had many interests unrelated to governing and a son whom he believed to be capable of taking over for him, and was talking of withdrawing from public life. He was also in financial difficulty, having been not nearly as skillful at the family business of banking as he was in other fields. In late 1491 his health was declining alarmingly, rheumatic fever having aggravated the effects of a disabling affliction that his physicians put under their catchall diagnosis of gout. One doctor prescribed pulverized pearls and precious gems, which must have been approximately as helpful as doses of ground glass. When he died in April 1492, aged only forty-three, his passing sparked intense grief in Florence. Elsewhere the news aroused mixed feelings, but the whole of Italy would have gone into mourning could it have foreseen how badly this greatest of the Medici would be missed in the terrible times that now lay just ahead.
When Innocent followed Lorenzo to the grave three and a half months later, few except his relatives could see any reason to be sorry.