11
I am Pope! I am Pope!
This is what Rodrigo Borgia is reported to have cried out in jubilation, almost in ecstasy, upon being chosen by his fellow cardinals to succeed Innocent VIII in August 1492. An alternative and more imperious version, translated from the Florentine Italian of five centuries ago, is:
I! I am Pope!
These words have invariably been interpreted as a spontaneous eruption of dark things that supposedly lay concealed under Cardinal Rodrigo’s cheerful exterior: pride, arrogance, joy in mastering people and things and bending them to sinister purposes.
But of course his outburst—assuming that it happened—can just as plausibly be seen in an entirely different light. As an expression of surprise—which Rodrigo’s election almost certainly was, to himself no less than to others. As an effusion of simple, almost childish joy from a man who had served five successive popes, had been witness to their innumerable failures and misdeeds, their few and dubious triumphs and sometimes gruesome tragedies, and was justified in thinking himself capable of doing better.
To which it is necessary to add that it is not certain—that it is on balance less than probable—that Rodrigo ever said any such thing. The first report of it appeared nine years after his election, in an anonymous pamphlet written for the purpose of showing him to be what its author explicitly called him: “the monster,” “this cursed beast” in the course of whose papacy “the bestiality and savagery of Nero and Caligula are surpassed.” Suffice it to note, for present purposes, that such a depiction of Rodrigo’s performance as pope is dubious at best.
This is the Borgia problem in a nutshell: wildly outlandish accusations accepted as true generation after generation because when taken together they add up to one of the most gloriously lurid stories in all of history. Anecdotes about murder and incest that are especially delicious because their subject is a pope, and that have become so firmly embedded in the consciousness of the whole world that to question them can seem fatuous, to challenge them preposterous.
If the problem begins with a notorious garden party in Siena during the reign of Pius II, it bursts into full bloom with the conclave that raised Rodrigo to the throne as Pope Alexander VI. It is vividly apparent, for example, in the work of the first noteworthy historian of medieval and Renaissance Italy, Francesco Guicciardini. He wrote—and influenced countless later historians by writing—that Cardinal Borgia’s election is a tale of how “with money, offices, benefices, promises, and all his powers and resources he suborned and bought the votes of the cardinals and the College.” And that the 1492 conclave was “a hideous and abominable thing, and a most apt beginning to [the new pope’s] future deplorable proceedings and behavior.”
As with so much Borgia history, Guicciardini’s allegations require closer examination than they have usually received. At the time of which he is writing, Guicciardini was a nine-year-old schoolboy in Florence. He never met a Borgia, is not known to have set foot in Rome when the Borgias were in power there, and in the course of growing to manhood absorbed his home city’s deep-rooted hostility toward Roman and papal power in general and the Borgias specifically. He could be ridiculously credulous, reporting for example that one night early in Alexander’s reign three suns appeared overhead and that “huge numbers of armed soldiers riding enormous steeds were seen for many days passing across the sky with a terrible clash of trumpets and drums.” He laced hisHistory of Italy (written some forty years after Rodrigo became Alexander) with the choicest products of the anti-Borgia pamphleteers who flourished in the opening decades of the sixteenth century. Though a pioneer in the use of documentary evidence, he had no credible documents to work with in writing of the 1492 conclave and little more than gossip to draw upon in dealing with the lives of the Borgias.
That Rodrigo nursed little hope of being elected is suggested by the fact that, during the five months or more during which Innocent VIII was declining toward death, he made no effort to increase the number of votes available to him. He could have asked the two cardinals then resident in Spain, his cousin Luis Juan del Milà (who had been appointed to the College of Cardinals with him back in 1456) and Pedro González de Mendoza (who owed his red hat to Rodrigo’s mission to Castile in the early seventies), to travel to Rome in time for the increasingly inevitable election. They would have represented nearly ten percent of the electors present at the conclave, providing a counterweight to the various nephews of Sixtus IV on hand to vote for their cousin Giuliano della Rovere.
If Rodrigo did in fact give himself little chance of being elected, this was in part because, of the twenty-three cardinals able to attend the conclave, only he and Jorge da Costa of Portugal were not Italian. Among the Italians, in addition to the della Rovere-Riario circle, were a Medici, a Sforza, representatives of the Orsini, Colonna, and Savelli families, Paul II’s three nephews, nephews of Pius II and Innocent VIII, and several cardinals who, if not so bountifully endowed with family connections, were esteemed for their personal qualities. In terms of talent as well as clout, it was a formidable assortment of plausible candidates, almost all of them preferring to keep the papacy in Italian hands.
In the summer of 1492 the usual intricacies of papal politics were complicated by growing antagonism between Naples and Milan, which threatened the stability of all Italy. The trouble originated this time not with a pope’s ambitions but with those of Ferrante of Naples, just a year short of his seventieth birthday, in his thirty-fourth year as king, but still probing restlessly for opportunities to extend his reach. Ferrante, whose political tool kit included everything from torture and cold-blooded murder to the subtlest diplomatic intrigues, had over the preceding three decades used arranged marriages to link his family to the Sforzas of Milan. In 1465 he had married his son and heir, Alfonso duke of Calabria, to Duke Francesco Sforza’s daughter. A generation later a daughter of this marriage, Isabella of Aragon, was wed to her nineteen-year-old first cousin Gian Galeazzo Sforza, who had inherited the ducal title at age seven following the assassination of his father. Aware that Gian Galeazzo was physically delicate and weak of will, Ferrante hoped to dominate Milan through Isabella. All such plans crumbled into dust, however, when Gian Galeazzo came of age and the self-appointed regent, his uncle Ludovico Sforza, refused to step aside.
If as tough an old cynic as Ferrante is not likely to have been much moved by the tearful complaints of the Duchess Isabella—who in addition to being a stronger personality than her husband was a great beauty, believed by some historians to be Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa—he did care greatly about the thwarting of his own schemes. His reaction had come at the start of 1492, when he radically changed course, calling a halt to his aggressions in the Papal States and resuming the annual payments that he owed to Rome as the pope’s vassal, thereby making peace with Innocent VIII and positioning Naples in opposition to Milan. Thus did Italy’s balance of power begin to totter. Because Rome was suddenly no longer at odds with Naples, the Venetians with their fear of Ferrante ceased to regard the pope as a dependable ally. Florence, which had long managed to keep both Milan and Naples as allies, found it difficult to do so now that the two were on such unfriendly terms.
Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death in April removed the one man who might have saved the situation. It left the leadership of Florence in the hands of his twenty-year-old son Piero. Lorenzo had been the same age when he succeeded his own father, and he had said with fatherly pride that Piero promised to be the greatest of the Medici. About that he was lamentably wrong. Florence’s new first citizen would come to be known as Piero the Unfortunate, an inappropriate label insofar as the worst of his misfortunes would be of his own making. His first great mistake was to turn his back on the Sforzas and ally Florence with Naples exclusively. The result, as predictable as it was laden with ill fortune for all of Italy, was a badly frightened Ludovico Sforza. Feeling himself isolated, with a hostile Venice to his east and Florence, Rome, and Naples all seemingly arrayed against him to the south, he could think of only one place to look for help. To the north. To France.
This was how things stood in July, when Innocent VIII expired, and in August, when twenty-three cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel (still a good many years from being handed over to Michelangelo for decoration) to elect a new pope. What became most obvious at the start was the bitter opposition of two irreconcilable factions. One, essentially Milanese, was led by Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, who in addition to being an able politician in his own right was a brother of the usurper Ludovico Sforza and therefore had all the resources of Milan at his disposal. Ascanio put himself forward as a candidate, and among his early supporters were Rodrigo Borgia and the cardinals then representing the Orsini and Conti clans. The group opposing him was led by the most relentlessly ambitious ecclesiastical politician then living, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who entered the conclave as the representative of a formidable assortment of interests. Among his supporters were Ferrante, whose aim was to achieve whatever result would be most damaging to Milan; young King Charles VIII of France, who had ambitions of his own where Italy was concerned and was reported to have made two hundred thousand ducats available for della Rovere’s use; and the city-state of Genoa, which contributed an additional hundred thousand out of fear of its neighbor Milan. Venice too leaned toward della Rovere for the simple reason that Milan opposed him, and the Colonna and Savelli cardinals were on his side because their rivals the Orsini and Conti supported Milan. In the Sistine Chapel as elsewhere, the enemy of your enemy was your friend.
In the first balloting no favorite emerged. Ascanio Sforza showed no strength at all, a reflection of his age, thirty-seven, and the unwillingness of his colleagues to put the papacy in the hands of a brother of the tyrant of Milan. Through subsequent ballots the feared and disliked della Rovere found himself stuck at five votes—just one more than the total delivered by himself and his cousins. As it became clear that another deadlock was taking shape, Rodrigo Borgia emerged as the only cardinal whose tally was rising, though just barely. It increased to seven while he was still giving his own vote to Ascanio, and a day later it was up to eight. The leader with nine was Oliviero Carafa, who was in an awkward position despite his impeccable reputation and his long record of achievement in diplomacy. He was drawing support from friends of Milan and of his native city of Naples as well. It was obvious to all that, if elected, he could find himself impossibly conflicted.
By the fifth day it was clear that no one closely associated with either Naples or Milan had a chance of being elected. The Sforzas, with Ascanio pulling every possible string, were prepared to go to any lengths to block della Rovere and his party. Della Rovere for his part would accept schism before a Milanese pope. As so often in the past, compromise was unavoidable. Once accepted as necessary, it was achieved quickly and with surprising ease. August 11 brought not only the election but ultimately the unanimous election of Rodrigo Borgia. And with it the start of rumors, immortalized in the reports of various ambassadors back to their home cities, of how the Spaniard had used his supposedly colossal wealth to buy the crown. According to one particularly colorful story, four stout mules had been needed to transfer a fortune in silver—or was it gold?—from Rodrigo’s palace to the residence of Ascanio Sforza.
What actually happened was that Ascanio, knowing his own election to be impossible and fearful that a prolongation of the deadlock might end in a shift to della Rovere, decided to instruct the members of his faction to support Rodrigo. Records of the conclave, lost in the Vatican archives for centuries, show that from the first day Ascanio had himself been voting for Rodrigo, as had two cardinals generally acknowledged to be incorruptible, Carafa and Piccolomini. Getting votes from the other camp was less easy, Rodrigo’s relationship with the prickly della Rovere being no better than anyone else’s. But that too came to pass, della Rovere himself deciding to align himself with the inevitable and undoubtedly not foreseeing just how bitter the loss of this election was going to make him. No tales of simony—of paying for votes—are needed to explain the outcome. Rodrigo’s initial support for Ascanio did not change the fact that, having declined to choose sides in the quarrel between France and Milan on one side and Naples and Venice on the other, he had no bonds of obligation to any of the leading powers. Thus if none of these powers could count on him for special favors, neither did any of them have reason to fear him or regard him as the agent of their enemies. At a dangerous time for all Italy, with the Church in urgent need of competent and responsible leadership, Rodrigo’s experience was unequaled. He was also respected and liked on all sides. And one searches in vain, even in the writings and recorded comments of his most intransigent political enemies, for contemporary evidence of immoral behavior. By any reasonable measure, taking into account the general state of affairs in Italy in 1492, he was quite simply the best man for the job.
None of which constitutes proof that the best man did not get the job by buying it, of course. But consider: to whatever extent money may have been a factor in the election, the big money was in the hands of della Rovere and, to a lesser but still impressive extent, of Ascanio Sforza. We have already seen that Rodrigo’s wealth was probably never nearly as great as is commonly assumed; if the papacy had in fact been for sale in 1492, he would have found it a challenge to outbid the competition. Nor, if he had attempted to buy it, could he ever have bought the votes of those cardinals who were definitely not for sale. The ambassadors who wrote home complaining of simony had personal agendas of their own. Usually they were attempting to excuse their failure to predict the election’s outcome. It is said that when Ferrante of Naples learned of the election’s result, he burst into tears. It is even suggested that he did so because it grieved him to see the papacy fall into the hands of such a bad man. That so vicious an old reprobate would be capable of deploring any such thing is preposterous. If anything made Ferrante weep, it was not corruption (almost the least of his own crimes) but the emergence of a pontiff who was likely to be impossible to control. While the conclave was still in process, he had described Rodrigo as “this one who has energy, brains, and resources”—and who should, therefore, be stopped from taking the throne. France, Venice, and Florence were all uneasy for exactly the same reason. Ferdinand and Isabella, on the other hand, were delighted at the election of an old friend and another Spanish pope.
Regardless of what or whether he shouted for joy, a man as well prepared and brimming with vitality as Rodrigo Borgia must have been thrilled to be elected. After a daylong coronation ceremony during which the people of Rome rejoiced at the crowning of a popular figure and the heavily robed object of their celebration fainted more than once in the summertime heat, Pope Alexander VI threw himself into his new role with his customary brio. Required as all new popes were to relinquish his benefices, he ended the month of August with a consistory at which the many bishoprics, abbeys, and other properties that he had accumulated over the decades were passed to other hands. Most of the cardinals benefited to a greater or lesser extent, providing inexhaustible ammunition to those writers who, over the centuries, have pointed to this first consistory of his reign as the mechanism through which Alexander redeemed the pledges that had bought him the throne.
But what is proved, really, by the fact that Alexander made Ascanio Sforza his successor as vice-chancellor? That he saw in the young Sforza not only a political ally but someone to whom he was willing to entrust important responsibilities, obviously. But if that is evidence of corruption, so is the time-honored practice of new U.S. presidents giving top posts not only to members of their own party but to individuals who helped them get elected. As for the fact that Alexander also gave Ascanio the sprawling palace that he had cobbled together out of a collection of derelict buildings, we saw earlier that it had from the start been not only Cardinal Rodrigo’s residence but a headquarters for the chancery’s great bureaucracy. Ascanio had no property of his own suitable for such purposes. That it was and would remain less a personal residence than a place of business is suggested by its subsequent history. It would pass from Ascanio to the next vice-chancellor after him, and beyond that to three more incumbents before finally being taken over by the papal treasury. That it was ultimately torn down and built over, and that no one ever bothered to make a picture of it or describe it in detail, raises doubts about whether it ever merited comparison with the many grand palaces that were being constructed in Rome at this same time and that continue to draw visitors to the city to the present day.
Alexander also attended to the interests of his family, but to an extent far too modest, in the beginning, to cause concern or even attract attention. At the same consistory at which he distributed his benefices, he appointed a single new cardinal, a Lanzol kinsman known in Rome as Giovanni Borgia. This was in no way shocking, not only because nepotism was taken for granted but because in this case the beneficiary was unquestionably well qualified. The new Cardinal Borgia, whom historians call Giovanni Borgia the Elder to distinguish him from a subsequent appointee of Alexander’s of the same name, had been brought to the papal court by his uncle Rodrigo many years before and had carved out an impressive career for himself there. He became a protonotary apostolic and then archbishop of Monreale in Sicily under Sixtus IV, served as governor of Rome under Innocent VIII, and had long been one of his uncle’s closest associates. Alexander’s transfer of his archbishopric of Valencia to a little-known adolescent named Cesare Borgia at this same time was, if less defensible, by no means a scandal. The see of Valencia had been in the Borgia family for more than sixty years at this point. If passing it along to a third generation was an act of nepotistic excess, it was nonetheless trivial when compared with some of the things that had come before, and the fact that Valencia was in Spain meant that it was a matter of little interest to the Italian cardinals. Beyond that, Alexander limited himself to bestowing the captaincy of the papal guard on a great-nephew and namesake from Spain, Rodrigo Lanzol y de Borja, and giving some minor administrative positions in the Papal States to a few other kinsmen so obscure that we don’t know how they were related to him.
The initial distribution of offices completed, Alexander turned to the most pressing of the problems left to him by Innocent VIII. The weakness of the late pope, especially in his final half-year when failing health made him more passive than ever, had allowed Rome and the surrounding territories to fall into even worse disorder than they usually did in the absence of firm leadership. The College of Cardinals had attempted to maintain order, sending crossbowmen into the streets, but this had limited effect. The Orsini and Colonna and other baronial clans got up to their usual black mischief, and criminals of all sorts found themselves free to do their worst with little fear of consequences. From the point at which it became known that Innocent was dying, more than two hundred murders were known to have been committed inside the city walls.
Alexander cracked down hard. On September 3 two notorious murderers, the del Rosso brothers, were publicly hanged and their house was pulled down. Those guilty of lesser crimes found themselves locked in the dungeons of the Castel Sant’Angelo. Not many weeks of this were needed to bring the city under control. A new force of watchmen and constables—twenty-one of them just for the Tiber bridges—made certain that it stayed that way.
Alexander was equally quick to address the abuses of a municipal justice system that had become seriously corrupt. He created new judgeships, appointed doctors of law to fill them, and ordered them to give a hearing to all complaints. He saw to it that they and other officials were paid promptly and well enough not to be tempted by petty bribes at least. This was the start of a series of reforms that culminated in a decree prescribing stern penalties for any officer of justice in any of the Papal States who either solicited or accepted a gift from anyone connected with a criminal or civil case. All decisions issued by judges found to have accepted a gift, or even to have agreed to do so, were declared null and void.
All this was remarkably advanced for its time, and Alexander went further still, initiating a practice without precedent in the history of the papacy. He reserved Tuesday as a day on which, every week, he would be personally available to any Roman, male or female, who came to see him with a complaint or petition. Those who came were allowed to speak for as long as they wished on any subject of their choosing. And he reformed the Vatican’s financial administration, imposing new checks on spending and significantly reducing the costs of the papal household. Even as intransigent a hater of popes in general and Borgias in particular as Stefano Infessura (in whose diary we find a weird story of a Jewish doctor bleeding three boys to death in a futile effort to save the life of Innocent VIII) conceded that Alexander’s reign “began most admirably.”
At the start of the conclave that had ended in his election, like all the other cardinals present, Rodrigo had signed a capitulation pledging, if he became pope, to call a general council of the Church. Even if after his election he had remained free to choose, quite possibly Pope Alexander would have followed the example of his predecessors and ignored this promise. Possibly but not certainly—by 1492 most cardinals wanted a council, not as in the past to undercut the authority of the pope, but to develop a program for raising the standards of the clergy generally. Throughout his life Rodrigo Borgia was not only not opposed to reform but a champion of it, as he had shown in his missions to Spain and Naples. The question is academic in any case; Alexander was not long free to choose. In short order problems arose that made the convening of a council first inadvisable and ultimately impossible.
The first of these problems emerged almost simultaneously with Alexander’s coronation. Count Franceschetto Cibo, Innocent VIII’s feckless son, had decided as his father’s death approached that he had no wish to try to hold on to the various properties of which he had been made lord. This was a sensible decision, Cibo being totally unsuited to the cutthroat struggle for advantage that dominated the lives of Italy’s petty tyrants. He was not only a worse weakling than his father but a compulsive and unsuccessful gambler, and in chronic need of cash. As Innocent’s reign ended, he prudently left Rome for his wife’s home in Florence. There, with the connivance of his brother-in-law Piero de’ Medici and the pope’s old rival Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, he set out to sell his property.
An eager buyer turned up in the person of Virginio Orsini, lord of Bracciano and at this time his family’s most powerful layman; only his cousin Cardinal Giovanni Battista Orsini possessed comparable influence. Virginio, recognizing a rare opportunity, declared himself willing to pay Cibo upward of forty thousand ducats for an assortment of castles and settlements less than a day’s ride north of Rome. There were difficulties, however. They began with the fact that the location of Cibo’s properties—at Cerveteri, Anguillara, Canale Monterano, and Rota—gave them strategic value in the eternal contest for control of the Papal States. Nobody distrustful of the Orsini, or of their ally and patron Ferrante of Naples, would be happy to see them fall into Virginio’s hands. The Sforza would regard such a development as intolerable. Worse, the properties in question were not actually Cibo’s to sell; they were fiefs of the pope. Complicating the situation still further, Virginio Orsini was himself simultaneously a papal vassal by virtue of his lordship of Bracciano and a condottiere serving as great constable of the kingdom of Naples—as, that is, commander of the armies of that tormenter of popes King Ferrante. At a time of recurrent friction between Naples and Rome, Virginio’s position was so ambiguous, his loyalties so mixed, as to be indecipherable. Such were the ambiguities of Italian life as the Renaissance was coming to full flower.
Not surprisingly, in light of how useful Cibo’s castles could prove to Ferrante whenever he next set out to make trouble in the Papal States, Alexander thought he saw the king’s hand in the proposed sale. He became convinced, very likely with Ascanio Sforza’s encouragement, that Ferrante was lending the purchase price to Virginio as the first step in a plan to turn the castles into outposts from which Naples could threaten Rome. About the financing of the transaction, at least, Alexander was wrong. The money was being supplied by Piero de’ Medici, whose mother and wife were both Orsini and whose sister was married to Cibo. But even if he had learned of his error, the pope would have had reason to remain troubled. The proposed sale would weaken papal authority in the Campagna district near Rome whether the castles ended up in Virginio’s possession or in Ferrante’s, and regardless of where the money came from. And an important principle was at stake: if Cibo and Virginio could close the deal without so much as acknowledging a need for papal approval, all the warlords of the Papal States would be encouraged to forget their obligations to Rome.
Nor would Alexander have been comforted had he known how deeply the Medici were involved. Or if he had been able to see that the driving force behind the crisis, its evil genius, was Giuliano della Rovere, whose continually building anger at having lost the papal election had sent him to Florence in search of ways to make trouble. He found his opportunity in Cibo’s eagerness to sell, Virginio’s hunger to buy, and Piero’s willingness to arrange the financing. The situation must have delighted him, especially the prospect of punishing Alexander and Ascanio for denying him the papal crown. The ramifications reached in every direction, and so many powerful men had a stake in the outcome that the potential consequences were beyond reckoning. Even the College of Cardinals broke once again into factions.
It was from such petty beginnings that the undoing of all Italy proceeded. Cibo had already handed over the castles to Virginio by the time Alexander learned of the sale, and when the pope objected, he was ignored. When word reached Milan of what was happening, Ludovico Sforza’s fear of being left isolated turned into something approaching panic. It was undoubtedly his brother Ascanio who, making full use of his insider position as vice-chancellor and papal friend, persuaded Alexander to summon a consistory at which he denounced Ferrante and effectively accused della Rovere of treason. Ferrante, himself alarmed now and in the unfamiliar position of being innocent of the charges against him, sent his son Federico to Rome to smooth things over. Duke Federico’s instructions were to offer not just an alliance but marriages between two members of the Neapolitan royal family and a couple of the numerous young Borgias who had been crowding into the papal court since Alexander’s election. Nothing came of this; a pact with Naples would have wrecked negotiations that Ascanio Sforza already had in process, on the pope’s behalf, to reconcile his brother in Milan and the government of Venice. Federico had to return to his father with nothing to show for two months at the papal court. Della Rovere, back in Rome but seeing the tide running strongly against him, withdrew to Ostia and barricaded himself inside a fortress commanding the Vatican’s access to the sea. Alexander responded by moving troops into the nearby coastal city of Civitavecchia, creating a standoff. When Ascanio’s negotiations bore fruit in the form of a new League of St. Mark, allying Rome not only with Milan and Venice but with the smaller city-states of Siena, Mantua, and Ferrara, a shocked Ferrante assured della Rovere that Naples would come to his aid if Alexander moved against him. General war seemed just one provocation away.
Everyone was afraid and mistrustful, and therefore everyone had become dangerously unpredictable. The League of St. Mark, created largely to assuage Ludovico Sforza’s sense of isolation, was inherently unstable. Though its members pledged themselves to remain allies for twenty-five years, Venice’s hunger for Milanese territory made this almost laughably unrealistic. Nevertheless it spooked Ferrante into preparing for a war that he emphatically did not want, the forces arrayed against him being now so numerous, and simultaneously launched him on an almost hysterical campaign to break the bond of trust that had linked Ferdinand of Spain and Rodrigo Borgia for the past twenty years. In a flurry of letters to his agents in Spain, to officials at the Spanish court, and to Ferdinand and Isabella themselves, Ferrante warned that Rome was now ruled by a monster in human form. In one of these missives, signed on June 7, 1493, and addressed to Ferdinand, he complained that “the Pope leads such a life that he is abhorred by everyone … he is anxious to be engaged in war, for from the beginning of his papacy he has done nothing else than seeking or causing trouble [and is] constantly at work with fraudulent machinations.”
Ferrante’s motives were transparently self-serving, his credibility nil. Ferdinand of Spain was as far from being credulous as it is possible for a human being to be, and he knew his Neapolitan cousin far too well not to see through this invective. Thus Ferrante’s word had no effect on Ferdinand’s opinion of a pope whom he had good reason to regard as a friend. To the extent that those words have provided rich fertilizer for the black Borgia myth, they should be measured against the reply of Juan López, bishop of Perugia, when asked by Spain for his opinion. “Rest assured,” López replied, “that the life, the intentions, and the sagacity of the Pontiff are different from what your letter represents them to be. I tell you, sir, that of the other popes whom you mention, not a one had a mind so exalted nor was one so respected as Pope Alexander, for his long experience, his intelligence, and his activity.” López was a native of Valencia who had entered the service of Rodrigo Borgia at an early age and served for a time as his private secretary. He knew whereof he wrote, therefore, and would appear to have had no reason to deceive the Spanish court. Even if one assumes that loyalty caused his opinion of Alexander VI to be excessively high, surely this implies nothing discreditable about the object of his admiration. Nor does it seem likely that loyalty to a onetime patron would have induced him to deceive a monarch as powerful as Ferdinand of Spain.
At the same time that Ferrante was attempting to interest Ferdinand in his problems, Ludovico Sforza of Milan was attempting to interest Charles of France in his. In this lay the tragedy of Italy—that its arcane quarrels drove its most important rulers to seek outside help at precisely the moment when the two rising powers of the north, France and Spain, were looking for new worlds to conquer. France, having absorbed the great duchies of Brittany and Burgundy and recovered from its long war with England, was as the 1490s began in the hands of an inexperienced king who nursed fantasies of achieving military glory on an intercontinental scale. Ferdinand and Isabella, having completed the unification of Spain by conquering Granada just seven months before Rodrigo Borgia became pope, were brimming with confidence and looking for uses for their growing power. Though they neither respected nor trusted their cousin in Naples—in fact they believed that their own claim to the Neapolitan crown superseded that of the bastard Ferrante—they were also acutely aware of French claims not only to Naples but to Milan as well. There could be no doubt about which side they would favor if Ferrante found himself in conflict with Milan and, through Milan, with France. And so the ludicrous character of Ferrante’s complaints about Pope Alexander did not deter Ferdinand from dispatching one of his most distinguished envoys to Rome to intervene on Ferrante’s behalf. Diego López de Haro arrived at the pontifical court with a long list of issues that his master wanted resolved. At the top were the League of St. Mark’s hostility to Naples and—another matter with which the Spanish monarchs urgently wanted help—Spain’s rights in the uncharted lands that Christopher Columbus had reported finding upon returning from his epic voyage of discovery only a few months earlier.
The timing was good, and things came together nicely. When the pope issued a bull legitimating Spanish claims in what Columbus himself believed was easternmost India or perhaps China, López de Haro was freed to be equally cooperative in return. And when Ferrante offered to press Virginio Orsini to compromise on Franceschetto Cibo’s disputed castles—he would have been eager to get that quarrel settled even if he had not been prodded by Ferdinand’s ambassador—Alexander too was willing to be responsive. It was known that representatives of Charles of France were in Italy on their way to Rome and that their assignment was to request—to demand, really—that Alexander invest their master with the crown of Naples. Ferrante most desperately of all, but also the pope and López de Haro, wanted to get their business settled before the Frenchmen arrived. Alexander knew as well as anyone that the League of St. Mark was worth little more than the parchment it was written on, and he was quicker than most to see the dangers of the Sforzas’ growing entanglement with France. As for Virginio, not even the chief of the Orsini could defy a combination that included his liege lord the pope, his employer the king of Naples, and the distant but fearsome king of Spain.
Thus it was all speedily wrapped up: a multifaceted settlement at the core of which was an end to the quarrel over the Cibo castles. Virginio agreed to pay thirty-five thousand ducats for the properties and to pay them not to Franceschetto Cibo, who was left out in the cold, but to Alexander as overlord. To put some political distance between the castles and Naples, they were sold not to Virginio himself but to his son. Virginio acknowledged that the transaction required the pope’s approval, thus resolving a crucial question of principle in Rome’s favor. The extent of Ferrante’s fear of the French, his determination to get everything settled before Charles VIII’s representatives could get to Rome, is evident in the fact that he and not the Medici bank ended up advancing the Orsini the purchase price. When Charles’s envoy Peron de Basche arrived just a few days later and demanded that the pope acknowledge the French king’s right to Naples, Alexander replied that the issue was legal rather than political and would have to be decided by a panel of lawyers. Basche responded angrily, knowing that he was being finessed, warning that the pope’s refusal to cooperate could lead to the calling of a general council. He knew, however, that the answer he had been given was as reasonable as it was adroit. Alexander took pains to be clear about one thing: his willingness to submit Charles’s claim to the scrutiny of experts would be contingent on France’s refraining from the use of force. If France attacked Naples, its claim would be rejected forthwith. In laying down these terms he foreshadowed the policy that would guide him in the months ahead and make it forever impossible to accuse him of being duplicitous in this matter. His deflection of Basche’s demands was masterful. Though it baffled and infuriated the ambassador, it kept Alexander free to offer his friendship to Charles and Ferrante alike.
On the diplomatic front, Alexander was racking up one success after another. He had profited handsomely from the transfer of the castles from Franceschetto Cibo to the Orsini, receiving both an infusion of gold ducats and confirmation of the papacy’s feudal rights. He had diverted Ferrante from going to war and had settled his own differences with the Orsini. He had even effected a reconciliation with Giuliano della Rovere, who came out from behind his battlements in Ostia and in company with Virginio journeyed to the Vatican to dine with the pope. The stature that these achievements had conferred upon him, and through him on his family, is reflected in the sudden interest of the kings of Naples and Spain alike in linking themselves to the pope through marriage.
There were difficulties all the same, and if these were unintended, they were nonetheless laden with danger. The return of della Rovere to the papal court was taken as a rebuke by Ascanio Sforza, who repaired to his brother’s court in Milan. His arrival, which Ludovico may have interpreted as meaning that Ascanio had been banished, angered and frightened the regent anew. Seeing that Naples was now rich in allies, certain that at the first opportunity Ferrante would gleefully drive him out of Milan and make Gian Galeazzo duke in fact as well as in title, Ludovico can hardly be blamed for thinking that his survival depended on recruiting support wherever it might be found.
He must have been comforted, however, by evidence that the rapprochement between Rome and Naples was quickly beginning to fray. When Alexander tried to demonstrate that he would welcome friendship with Milan and France, Ferrante took this as a betrayal. He resumed his old game of hiring condottieri to make trouble in the Papal States. Sensitivities grew so keen that it became impossible for Alexander to strike a balance acceptable to both sides. His nomination in September 1493 of twelve new cardinals sparked angry objections among the Sacred College’s sitting members. This happened not for the reason usually given—the youth of two of the pope’s choices, Alessandro Farnese and the same Cesare Borgia who had earlier been given the see of Valencia—but mainly because of the sheer number of nominees, and to a lesser extent because so many of them were longtime associates of the pope’s and disposed to follow his lead.
The college had always been uneasy about increases in its size, nothing being more obvious than that as the number of members grew, each member declined in importance. And now Alexander was adding a full dozen at once, more than half of them Curia officials likely to side with him in almost any crisis, plus two fellow Spaniards and a scattering of northern Europeans unlikely ever to become much involved in Roman or Vatican politics. The number was not unprecedented, but it was certainly unusual, half a century having passed since Eugenius IV’s creation of seventeen new cardinals at a single stroke in 1439. Even those cardinals who were not in sympathy with Alexander’s policies would have conceded that it made good sense for an ambitious pontiff to start loading the Sacred College with longtime associates, youthful protégés, and distant foreigners. To do otherwise would have been folly; by appointing cardinals likely to be uncooperative, Alexander would have been impeding the pursuit of his own priorities. His choices confirmed—as though confirmation were needed—that he was no fool and that he was in firm charge of Rome and the Church. He was entrenching himself for the battles he knew to lie ahead.
As for Farnese and Cesare Borgia, there was no real problem. Farnese was of distinguished family and well known at court, having been singled out for advancement in the reign of Innocent VIII. He was also virtually a member of the papal household, his famously beautiful sister Giulia being married to Orsino Orsini, the son of Alexander’s cousin and domestic manager Adriana del Milà. Cesare Borgia, if not familiar to many of the cardinals, was certainly a familiar type, and no one could have been astonished by the spectacle of a pope raising an unproven kinsman to the highest level of the hierarchy. The question of exactly how this particular young favorite was related to this particular pope will be addressed in due course.
The real problem with the new cardinals rose out of the grievances of the Italian states. Not one of the appointees was from Naples, Alexander perhaps thinking that he was already seen as excessively friendly to Il Regno. Predictably, Ferrante took this as an affront. The sole Milanese nominee was a protégé of Ascanio Sforza, who in fact had proposed him as a candidate, but by this point Alexander’s relations with the Sforza brothers had deteriorated to such an extent that no mere red hat could make a significant difference. Ludovico had become convinced that his fate and those of his wife and children depended upon getting himself invested as duke, and that the only man in Europe with both the ability and the willingness to make this happen was Charles VIII of France.
Charles for his part had ample reasons to want to be helpful: dreams of greatness that he thought it his destiny to fulfill. Barely twenty-three years old in the summer of 1493, he had inherited the crown from his father Louis XI while still a child and spent several years under the tutelage of his canny sister Anne de Beaujeu, who ruled as regent until he came of age. He was an odd little figure, comically ill formed, with a large red nose on a head too big for his spindly body and splayed feet that caused him to walk in a crablike shuffle. Not long after he became king, his sister’s government had provided men and ships for the quixotic expedition that led to their cousin Henry Tudor’s coronation as Henry VII of England. The improbable success of this adventure undoubtedly contributed to Charles’s romantic vision of himself as a future conquering hero. He fixated on a part of his supposed inheritance that his father had been too shrewd to take seriously: the idea that with the extinction of the House of Anjou they had become the rightful kings of Naples, and that Alfonso V and his son Ferrante were interlopers with no legitimate claim. Told that as king of Naples he was also king of Jerusalem, Charles clutched that fantasy to his breast as well.
Ludovico’s urgent wish to become duke of Milan fit in nicely with Charles’s aspirations. As early as 1491 the young king communicated his willingness to support Ludovico in supplanting his nephew as soon as circumstances permitted. Thereby he won Milan’s strongman as his ally and willing agent. In the autumn of 1492 Charles summoned representatives of his kingdom’s three estates to the city of Tours to hear his announcement of a crusade against the Turks and his intention to take possession of Naples along the way. When the more experienced of his counselors threw up their hands at the impracticality of all this—among other problems it was impossibly beyond the French crown’s financial resources—Charles cheerfully ignored them. It was at about this time that the Venetian diplomat Zaccaria Contarini, in a description of the France of his day, included a revealing sketch of the young king.
“He is small and ill-made,” Contarini wrote, “ugly of countenance, with large, colorless eyes; he is short-sighted; his nose is aquiline and both longer and thicker than is natural; he has lips likewise thick, always hanging open; his hands twitch with spasmodic movements very ugly to see, and his speech comes hesitantly. My opinion may be erroneous, but it seems to me certain that physically and morally he does not amount to a great deal.”
As king of a nation the power of which had been painstakingly restored by his father’s long years of crafty diplomacy, however, Charles amounted to a great deal indeed. He had it within his means to commit great folly, and to that purpose he was willing to give away much of what Louis XI had gained. To make certain that his back and flanks would be secure when he departed France for Italy and perhaps the Ottoman Empire as well, he entered into a series of fantastically costly treaties. With the Treaty of Étaples, his onetime hero Henry VII of England agreed to call home the invasion force that he had sent to Brittany and relinquish his claim to that county (a claim he had never expected to make good), receiving in return a payoff in the colossal amount of £159,000, payable in installments that would double the income of the Tudor court for years. To secure the Treaty of Barcelona, and with it Ferdinand’s and Isabella’s pledge of neutrality, Charles paid an even higher price, surrendering the Pyrenees regions of Roussillon and Cerdagne. Finally he signed the Treaty of Senlis, by which he renounced his claims to the counties of Burgundy, Artois, and Charolais in favor of Maximilian of Hapsburg. His counselors were in despair.
Despite everything he was sacrificing, it was going to be impossible for Charles to legitimate his designs on Naples unless he could secure papal approval. He needed to get Alexander VI, who as pope was Naples’s suzerain or overlord, to repudiate Ferrante and his dynasty and invest him, Charles, with the crown. At the end of 1493, in a fresh effort to win the pope over, he sent a delegation headed by his chief minister and mentor Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of St. Malo. This mission, like the one sent earlier in the year for the same purpose, came to nothing. Alexander and Briçonnet had long talks, the pope going so far as to offer his visitor a cardinal’s hat in return for making his young master see the dangers, not only to Italy but to France itself, of an attack on Naples. Briçonnet appears to have found the pope’s arguments persuasive and his offer tempting, but to the extent that he expressed his concerns upon returning to France, they had no impact.
If Charles cared about the pope’s refusal, he did not care enough to be deterred. His court had become home to a large contingent of Neapolitan nobles who had fled northward to escape destruction after the failure of their rebellion against Ferrante. These refugees told the king something he was childishly delighted to hear: that all Naples would rise to support him as soon as he arrived. France’s cardinals (not one of whom had been present at the 1492 conclave) were meanwhile telling him that Alexander’s opinion was of no importance because he had not been honestly elected and so was not a legitimate pope. In removing Alexander, these cardinals said, Charles would be rescuing Holy Mother Church and making himself all the more a hero. Bankers from various Italian city-states were demonstrating their commitment to the great cause by offering to lend Charles huge sums—so long as he put up the crown jewels as collateral and agreed to pay fourteen percent interest. Hearing such things, monarchs less gullible than Charles VIII might have found it easy to believe that the enterprise he was planning had been ordained by God and could not fail.
Still, Naples was a long way from France, and to reach it Charles would have to take his army first across the Alps, then across the great duchy of Milan, and finally across the Apennines. And even after all the loans and all the pawning of royal treasure, he was seriously short of funds. But then Ludovico Sforza stepped forward with an offer impossible to refuse. He promised not only to do nothing to impede the passage of French troops through Milan, but to facilitate their advance with all the means at his disposal. He would put his warships at the service of the king, along with money and five hundred “men at arms”—mounted and armored knights accompanied by their squires and pages.
Italy had long been a powder keg. Now, in an act that he would live to regret bitterly, Ludovico had lit the fuse.
Background
MADNESS AND MILAN
THE MILAN OF LUDOVICO SFORZA WAS A CLASSIC TYRANNY OF the distinctly Italian type: a city-state ruled by a family that had taken it by force, used force to keep itself in power, and had only the scantiest legitimate claim to its position, its wealth, and its power.
It was also the greatest of the tyrannies, with a capital city that was immense by the standards of the time (as many as a quarter of a million people may have lived within the walls of Milan as the fifteenth century approached its close). It had command of the great Lombard Plain with its thousands of square miles of fertile farmland, and a large middle class that was growing rich in banking and the manufacture of products ranging from silk to weaponry.
Milan was an archetype in another way as well. Its ruling dynasty, which had been in place for 215 years when Rodrigo Borgia became pope, exemplified a phenomenon that was tragically common among both the greatest and pettiest of Italy’s warlord families. Power beyond the reach of any rule of law, mixed with the insecurities inherent in having little right to that power and being under chronic threat from jealous and ambitious rivals, had a way of breeding homicidal psychopaths. The Ludovico Sforza who invited Charles VIII of France into Italy in 1493 was a paragon of sanity, decency, and restraint compared with the most memorable of his Visconti and Sforza forebears. This of course raises the question of whether it was precisely because he was not as savage as those forebears that his fate would be tragic.
Ludovico and his brother Cardinal Ascanio owed their exalted positions in state and church to half a dozen generations of talented, strong, ruthlessly grasping, and in some cases only marginally sane ancestors. All the Visconti and Sforza were tall and fair with red-blond hair—descended, almost certainly, from the Langobards or Lombards who poured into Italy from Germany in the sixth century and gave their name to the enormous plain on which they settled. The Visconti were already prominent among the Milanese nobility when, in 1277, one of their members, a warlike seventy-year-old archbishop, defeated a rival family, made himself master, signore, of the city, and positioned his relatives to retain control after his death. Half a century later the fourth Visconti to serve as Milan’s prelate, the “pseudo-cardinal” Giovanni (pseudo because his red hat was conferred by a schismatic antipope), paid half a million florins for papal recognition of himself and his brother Luchino as official co-rulers. The brothers greatly expanded the Milanese state, absorbing many other cities on the Lombard Plain.
Their conquests passed in the next generation to another set of brothers: Matteo, Galeazzo, and Bernabò Visconti, the first members of the family to show symptoms of serious mental (and moral) instability. Matteo was so incompetent and irresponsible, and such a slave to bestial sexual appetites, as to make not only himself but the whole family an object of popular revulsion. He died suddenly one evening after supper, and though there is no proof that he was poisoned by his brothers (their mother insisted that he was), it is not implausible that Galeazzo and Bernabò had resorted to murder to protect their own positions. For the next twenty-three years each of the two surviving brothers had possession of half of the Milanese state, Galeazzo ruling the western portion from a great palace at Pavia while Bernabò ruled the east from the city of Milan. The latter became legendary for his ferocity and bellicosity, in the process getting himself excommunicated by three successive popes and on one occasion forcing envoys to eat the bull of excommunication that they had traveled from Rome to deliver. Chastised by an archbishop of Milan who happened, rather unusually, not to be a Visconti, he replied with a purely rhetorical question: “Do you not know, you fool, that here I am pope and emperor and lord in all my lands and that no one can do anything in my lands save I permit it—no, not even God?”
Even if the most terrible stories about Bernabò were the inventions of his enemies, it does appear to be true that he had a propensity to remove people who offended him by burying them alive, and to inflict gruesomely disproportionate punishments on those accused of crimes. (Anyone daring to hunt on land reserved for his use, for example, would be blinded or hanged.) But he was not entirely monstrous: law and order were strictly maintained during his long, hard rule, and his humblest subjects found that they could expect to be treated justly in the Milanese courts even when challenging the rich and powerful. Bernabò’s fatal mistake turned out to be not his excessive willingness to make war on his neighbors, not the licentiousness that made him the admitted father of at least thirty children, but his failure to take the measure of his nephew Gian Galeazzo, who had inherited command of the western half of the duchy upon the death of his father, Galeazzo.
Gian Galeazzo was a refined and cultivated man, exceptionally well educated by the standards of fourteenth-century warlords and free of the rude and brutish arrogance of his uncle. Bernabò interpreted all this as foppish weakness and regarded his nephew (whom he had also forced to become his son-in-law) with undisguised contempt. Told that Gian Galeazzo was plotting against him, he dismissed the warnings as ridiculous and so found himself being tricked, taken captive, and thrown into a prison where he soon died, reportedly of poisoning. At which point the quiet Gian Galeazzo reunited the two halves of the duchy and launched a campaign of conquest more ambitious than anything attempted by his predecessors.
Tall and impressively handsome, Gian Galeazzo was also physically timid. He spent most of his adult life in semiseclusion, protected by phalanxes of armed guards. Though he never commanded an army in the field, he hired capable condottieri, instructed them never to engage an enemy except when they had a decisive advantage, and spent lavishly to make sure that they always had such an advantage. Step by step he brought city after city to heel—first Verona and Vicenza, then Padua and Pisa and Siena, and eventually Perugia, Assisi, Nocera, Spoleto, and Lucca. Finally even great Bologna submitted to him. Along the way Gian Galeazzo became the first duke of Milan, paying Holy Roman emperor-elect Wenceslaus of Bohemia one hundred thousand ducats for the title. The flagrant sale of such an exalted rank—the highest after royalty—was such a scandal that it contributed to Wenceslaus’s deposition from the imperial throne. But it was not revocable and gave Gian Galeazzo a semblance of legitimacy.
Gian Galeazzo’s father, in an earlier effort to purchase respectability, had spent a comparable fortune to secure the marriage of his twelve-year-old son to a daughter of the financially desperate King Jean II of France. The boy became a father at fourteen, but when his wife died after ten years of marriage, only one of her six children, a daughter named Valentina, survived. When this daughter was grown, Gian Galeazzo returned her to the French royal family, marrying her to Louis duke of Orléans, brother of King Charles VI. Two generations later this marriage would have troublesome consequences: when the male line of Viscontis became extinct, Valentina’s grandson, another Louis of Orléans, would come forward with a credible claim to the duchy of Milan.
Gian Galeazzo aspired to be no mere duke but monarch of a kingdom of Lombardy encompassing not only his duchy but all of Tuscany and more. When Bologna fell into his hands, this dream appeared to be within reach; only an exhausted and isolated Florence remained to be taken. But Milan was exhausted also, its wealth gone to fund Gian Galeazzo’s wars and palaces and other extravagances, its people (called “subjects” rather than citizens now that their master was a duke) taxed to the brink of rebellion. All remained in suspension as Gian Galeazzo, triumphant but without the means for further action, withdrew into deeper seclusion and contracted the fever of which he died aged fifty.
His collection of conquests fell apart with astonishing speed, one city-state after another breaking free from the regency of his widow, Duchess Caterina. She was Gian Galeazzo’s first cousin, daughter of the late Bernabò, who had bullied his nephew into marrying her after the death of his French first wife. By her he had two sons, both of whom became exemplars of the dangers of inbreeding, displaying all the worst characteristics of the Visconti bloodline and few if any of its strengths. The elder, Giovanni Maria, was barely in his teens when he became duke, and in short order he had his mother thrown into prison. Like her father before her she soon died, and she too is said to have been poisoned. The new duke was a depraved monster—the word really does apply—best remembered for the delight he took in watching his dogs tear apart the bodies of living men. When he was assassinated at age twenty-three, mercifully before reproducing himself, his brother and successor Filippo Maria proved to be, if less obviously insane, profoundly disturbed. His father Gian Galeazzo’s reclusiveness and paranoia were in him carried to extremes. Perhaps because physical ugliness intensified his innate shyness, perhaps just because he became too fat to mount a horse, he sequestered himself behind the high walls of his father’s grandiose palace and made himself the center of a network of spies, secret agents, guards, and soldiers responsible for protecting him from his guards. He waged war across northern Italy without himself ever coming within miles of a skirmish, using condottieri in a lifelong, sometimes atrociously cruel and only partly successful campaign to restore the duchy to what it had been at the time of Gian Galeazzo’s death.
Why he bothered is a mystery, for he never displayed the smallest interest in the future of the dynasty. He had a marriage of convenience with the wealthy widow of one of his father’s generals, and a single mistress with whom he sired two daughters only one of whom, Bianca Maria, lived past infancy. When in 1430 he betrothed the six-year-old girl to the greatest condottiere of the century, the thirty-year-old widower Francesco Sforza (whose first wife and child had been murdered by his aunt), Filippo Maria offered valuable properties as his daughter’s dowry and appears to have been motivated solely by a determination to keep Sforza in his employ. He later made repeated attempts to break off the engagement, with Sforza sometimes on his payroll and at other times leading the armies of Milan’s enemies. When the wedding finally took place in 1441 (Bianca being sixteen by then, the bridegroom forty), Filippo Maria was forced to consent to it because of defeats inflicted on him by Venetian forces commanded by none other than his prospective son-in-law.
Filippo Maria anointed no heir, and when he died in 1447, the claimants to Milan included the Holy Roman emperor (because he was Milan’s feudal overlord), Valentina Visconti’s son Charles duke of Orléans, the Republic of Venice, and Francesco Sforza. All were held off as Milan became a republic, but this proved a doomed enterprise. Sforza made war on the capital, forcing it to surrender after a prolonged siege that reduced the population to eating cats and dogs. Once securely in place as duke, he became less interested in conquest than in protecting what he had won and turned into a force for peace and stability. He forged a close friendship with Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence, and the two worked together to put a durable balance of power in place across Italy.
He found himself happily married as well. Bianca Maria Visconti Sforza proved to be a dependable manager, a capable diplomat, and therefore a duchess of real consequence. The pair had eight children, and of these only one, unfortunately their eldest son Galeazzo Maria, gave evidence of having inherited the Visconti tendency to madness. Upon succeeding his father at age twenty-two, Galeazzo Maria set about building a reputation as a rapist, torturer, and murderer (starving to death a priest accused of predicting that his reign would be short). He cast aside his worried mother and inevitably was accused of having her poisoned when she died in exile. We have already seen the calamities that flowed from all this. First Galeazzo Maria was himself murdered, by Milanese nobles he had pushed too far. Then his brother Ludovico seized power, took custody of the seven-year-old heir to the ducal title, Gian Galeazzo, and proclaimed himself regent. Things got mortally serious a decade later, when Gian Galeazzo came of age, his wife Isabella protested to her grandfather Ferrante of Naples that Ludovico was refusing to relinquish control, and Ferrante broke with Milan and left Ludovico feeling so alone and fearful that he not only invited the king of France to invade Italy but offered to pay him to do so.
Anxieties about Naples notwithstanding, by 1493 there was every reason for the Milanese to think themselves fortunate to be ruled by Ludovico. He was as solidly normal a man as the Visconti-Sforza family tree had produced, with the exception of Duke Francesco. Intelligent, energetic, and cultivated, superbly educated under the direction of his mother Bianca, he displayed none of the psychopathic viciousness of his elder brother, his maternal grandfather, his great-uncle, and other ancestors dating back to Matteo and Bernabò Visconti. Since pushing his sister-in-law out of the regency, he had given much attention to the development of Milan’s economy. He had come to be known as Il Moro not (as has often been written) because he was dark like a Moor (in fact he was fair with his family’s golden hair) but because moro is the Italian word for his personal emblem, the mulberry tree. Known since ancient times as “the most prudent of trees,” last to put out leaves in the springtime, the mulberry was an essential source of food for the worms on which Milan’s lucrative silk-manufacturing industry was based.
Prudent or not—the 1490s would provide reason for doubting that he was—Il Moro had much cause for satisfaction as it became clear that Charles of France was serious about attacking Naples. Now it was Ferrante’s turn to be frightened—he and Pope Alexander as well. Il Moro meanwhile had a bride with whom he was delighted, the lovely and vivacious Beatrice d’Este, daughter of the duke of Ferrara. Since her arrival in Milan in 1491, Beatrice had, almost inevitably under the circumstances, developed a poisonously hateful relationship with the frustrated Duchess Isabella. Still only sixteen, Beatrice became a determined advocate of the use of French power to drive her rival’s family out of Naples.
In the year following Il Moro’s marriage, the resolution of issues that had long put the French crown at odds with the Holy Roman Empire made it possible for him to form a friendship with emperor-elect Maximilian of Hapsburg without offending France. The two worked out a deal. The cash-strapped Maximilian got, in addition to Duke Gian Galeazzo’s sister as his bride, something that probably mattered to him far more: a dowry in the amount of four hundred thousand ducats. Il Moro got the prestige of linking the Sforza family to the highest level of European royalty and also (what mattered to him far more) the promise that upon becoming emperor Maximilian would invest him as duke of Milan, stripping the title from Gian Galeazzo.
Ludovico il Moro was no longer isolated. To the contrary, his position as de facto French agent in Italy, coupled with the expectation of an imminent French invasion, made him an enemy to be feared and an ally to be coveted. Thus even his old rival Venice, wanting no trouble with France, joined with Milan and Rome in the newly formed League of St. Mark and accepted Ludovico as its head. And Beatrice’s family connections now proved their value. Her father Ercole d’Este brought his duchy of Ferrara into the league, followed by Francesco Gonzaga marquess of Mantua, who was married to Beatrice’s sister Isabella.
To cap it all off, Milan had as its representative in Rome none other than the vice-chancellor of the Church, Ascanio Sforza, cardinal since 1484 and pivotal figure in the election of Alexander VI. Comfortably back in his old place at the papal court now that Milan and Rome were allied in the league, Ascanio was prepared to do everything in his power to persuade Alexander to support the French claim to Naples. He was no less willing, if that proved impossible, to join the chorus of voices urging Charles to depose the pope as he passed through Rome on his way to Naples.
Of all the princes in Italy, Ludovico Sforza seemed best positioned to profit from the drama that was beginning to unfold.