12
The rush of hungry relatives and hangers-on to Rome whenever a new pope took office appears to have been no less a spectacle in the case of the Borgias than at the start of other pontifical reigns.
This was true in part simply because the family was so large and so fast-growing. At a time when infant mortality rates were heartbreakingly high, the ability to produce healthy babies in abundance and bring them to maturity was one of the Borgia family’s gifts. Most of the Borgia couples of whom we have record were survived by impressive numbers of daughters and sons, who were prolific in their turn if they did not go into the Church—and no doubt occasionally even then. They were a vigorous and hearty lot, ready to go wherever opportunity beckoned.
The family tree was not only thick with branches but maddeningly tangled—a trap for genealogists ever since. As happens in many families, baptismal names were handed down from generation to generation: Rodrigos and Jofrès, Juans and Juanas, Pedros and Isabellas appear again and again, sometimes more than once in a single generation. The confusion to which this gave rise was compounded twice over by a practice somewhat more unusual: the tendency of the offspring of Borgia daughters to discard their father’s surname because their mother’s, belonging as it did not merely to a pope but to two popes, had come to carry so much more weight.
The confusion spread everywhere and has been long-lasting. Even today one sees it asserted that the Rodrigo Borgia who became Alexander VI was actually not a Borgia at all in the male line but a Lanzol (or Lançol). This particular misunderstanding is not only unnecessary but inexcusable, there being no possible doubt, as we saw in Part One, that Rodrigo’s father and his mother were de Borjas. It grew out of the marriage of Rodrigo’s sister Juana to a Valencian baron named Pedro Guillen Lanzol, and the fact that their children bore, in keeping with Spanish practice, the name Lanzol y de Borja. The first members of this branch of the clan to migrate to Rome created the impression that all Borgias were actually Lanzols, and this assumption—valid with respect to all the Roman Borgias except the two popes and Rodrigo’s short-lived brother Pedro Luis—came to be attached, incorrectly, to Rodrigo. It clung to him even as his relatives gradually discarded the Lanzol patronym because being Borgias marked them as people not to be taken lightly.
Some of the Roman Borgias remain mysteries to this day. When Cardinal Scarampo took a fleet of warships off to fight the Turks in 1456, two of his galley captains were named Juan and Miguel Borgia. We have no idea where these two came from, but their name and the fact that both later turn up as administrators in the Papal States make it impossible not to suppose that they were related to Calixtus and Alexander. More strikingly, no one has ever been able to explain the parentage of a certain Francesco Borgia who was a prominent figure at the papal court throughout Alexander’s reign, was repeatedly given responsibility for handling important family business, and would become a cardinal in 1500. Speculation that he was Calixtus’s illegitimate son is supported by no evidence and has to be considered improbable. Perhaps it needs to be added that he was no more than a decade younger than Alexander VI and therefore was not his son. One hypothesis—not implausible considering that he is believed to have been born in Játiva—is that he was Alexander’s younger brother.
Young Borgia clerics found themselves rising even higher and faster after Rodrigo became pope than they had before, and the family’s laymen too found doors opening for them in delightful ways. Some of the most dazzling opportunities were in the dynastic marriage market. We have already seen the lofty unions arranged by Sixtus IV for his nephews and nieces, and by Innocent VIII for his son and granddaughter. By the early 1490s, with Italy in turmoil and a French invasion seemingly inevitable, the desperation with which the peninsula’s rulers were looking for allies had brought that market to a rolling boil.
Pope Alexander, attractive as an ally himself and as needful of friends as any of his fellow rulers, had four especially fine pieces of merchandise to put on offer in Rome. They were the quartet of Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia, and Jofrè Borgia, siblings who at the time of Alexander’s election ranged in age from about ten or eleven to seventeen. They had an older, closer connection to the pope than any of their cousins, having been part of Cardinal Rodrigo’s household for at least four or five years, in some cases possibly longer. We have already seen Ferrante, at the end of 1492, send his son to Rome in search of an alliance, offering both a daughter and a granddaughter as brides for Borgias and being turned down. Just weeks later, as part of the agreement by which Rome, Milan, and Venice all came together in the League of St. Mark, Alexander and Ludovico il Moro jointly decided that Lucrezia, still not thirteen years old, was to be married to Ludovico’s cousin Giovanni Sforza, lord of Pesaro and a twenty-six-year-old widower.
It was Alexander’s policy, from which he never deviated except when circumstances made consistency impossible, to seek friendly relations with all the major powers and try to keep any of them from feeling isolated. Thus the creation of the Italian League, because it excluded Naples, became the pope’s cue not only to restore his lines of communication with the excluded Ferrante but to respond, if belatedly, to the latter’s proposal that the Borgias and the royal House of Aragon should become linked through matrimony. The result, abetted by Ferdinand of Spain’s envoy to Rome Diego López de Haro, was a pair of significant betrothals. Jofrè, who could not have been more than eleven years old, was promised to Ferrante’s illegitimate granddaughter Sancia, then about fifteen. Jofrè’s elder brother Juan, then in his late teens, was to return to Castile to be married into the Spanish royal family. The youngest of the Borgia brothers would not have been Ferrante’s choice as bridegroom for Sancia, his brother Cesare being not only more suitable in age but clearly the brightest, liveliest, and most promising of the young Borgias. But Alexander had long since assigned Cesare to a career in the Church, and though his young ward had not yet taken any clerical vows, the pope had no interest in changing his plans. Jofrè too was in the earliest stages of being groomed for the clergy, but in his case the pope was willing to make adjustments. He certainly understood that Cesare was made of stronger stuff than his younger sibling—that he had far more of what it would take to become a third Borgia pope.
By the end of the summer of 1493, the futures of Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia, and Jofrè seemed to be assured. Juan, who had inherited from a deceased elder brother (more about him later) the Spanish dukedom of Gandía, was married in Barcelona to a young cousin of Ferdinand and Isabella (who were themselves cousins, as we have seen). The monarchical couple attended the wedding, though Isabella was skeptical about the bridegroom—presciently doubtful about the kind of husband and courtier he was likely to be. At almost the same time Cesare became one of the dozen new cardinals appointed by Alexander VI, and in a ceremony at the Vatican, young Jofrè was quietly married by proxy to Sancia of Aragon, becoming thereby prince of Squillace in the kingdom of Naples and lord of extensive Neapolitan estates. Two months later, in a secret ceremony, Lucrezia was married to Giovanni Sforza and became countess of the city-state of Pesaro on the Adriatic coast. The sensitivities of Milan, Venice, and the other northern states made it seem prudent to defer making these arrangements public, and in light of the extreme youth of Lucrezia and Jofrè there was certainly no need to hurry. At Alexander’s insistence it was agreed that Lucrezia would remain in Rome and the consummation of her marriage would be deferred even after the performance of a public wedding ceremony.
All too soon it became clear that things were not working out as planned. Juan duke of Gandía, a difficult character under the best of circumstances, had been sent off to Spain in the care of a guardian appointed by Alexander and under a deluge of papal admonitions to behave himself. The first reports to reach Rome showed that he was already out of control. His tactless arrogance had offended the king and queen, and immediately after his wedding he went off on such a wild spree of drinking, gambling, and whoring that it was said to be improbable that he had bothered to consummate the marriage. Sent to Spain to cement the pope’s relationship with the dual kingdom’s royal family, beautifully positioned to reap the rewards of Ferdinand and Isabella’s indebtedness to Alexander, Juan was becoming instead a threat to the survival of the connection.
Though Lucrezia eventually had a grand public wedding, a lavish spectacle used by Alexander to express the importance of the event and indulge his love of ceremony and display (the bride was escorted by 150 daughters of Rome’s leading families), it did not appear to be leading her into a happy or even a stable future. In the weeks following, Lucrezia’s husband became so dissatisfied with their sexless “white marriage,” and so uneasy about the way the pope appeared to be cooling in his friendship with the Sforzas and inching toward Naples instead, that he departed Rome alone and without explanation, sending back an insulting demand for money. He appears to have been an unusually ordinary Sforza, colorless in personality and devoid of ambition, but he was not wrong to be worried. The political landscape had changed considerably since he and Lucrezia were first betrothed, his marriage was losing its political value for the Borgias as a result, and his presence in Rome had become a nuisance for everyone concerned. His departure for Pesaro, by setting the tongues of Rome wagging, accomplished nothing except to create frenzies of speculation and embarrassment. The pope tried to show himself still friendly to the Sforzas of Milan, but his gestures in that direction were thin in substance and impressed no one.
In May 1494, when the Jofrè-Sancia marriage was made public and the youngest Borgia brother was sent off to Naples to take up his new life as a husband and prince, his situation was little less awkward than Giovanni Sforza’s. The problem in this case was that Jofrè, physically attractive like his siblings but scarcely out of childhood and already showing himself to be passive and as bland as Lucrezia’s husband, had been given as his wife a headstrong and recklessly pleasure-hungry young woman whose character had been shaped in the morally lax court of her grandfather Ferrante. She showed herself to be less than delighted with a spouse significantly younger and less lively than herself. The fact that Jofrè was by all accounts a well-behaved youth did nothing to ease her restlessness; good behavior never had much appeal for her. The marriage, ill conceived from the start, was already troubled and rich in potential for more of the same.
As for the eldest of the four, Cesare, in him there was potential not just for trouble but for calamity. Not yet twenty, he was already high in the Church and had been so from early childhood: appointed an apostolic protonotary at the preposterous age of seven, he became archdeacon in the Borgia hometown of Játiva and rector of Gandía not long afterward. He was bishop of Pamplona at about sixteen (this is not quite as appalling as it sounds, as Cesare got the title and the income that went with it, but was not expected and indeed would not have been allowed to actually function as bishop). Only a year after that, upon Rodrigo’s election, he was given the see of Valencia, and by the time another year had passed he was a teenage cardinal.
The problem was not just grossly premature advancement but the fact that, though intelligent, ambitious, educated in canon and civil law, and attractive both physically and in personality, Cesare never had and never pretended to have the slightest aptitude for an ecclesiastical career. There survives a unique early description from about this time, written by the duke of Ferrara’s ambassador to Rome Giovanandrea Boccaccio, who exclaims that though only about seventeen Cesare “possesses marked genius and a charming personality; he bears himself like a great prince; he is especially lively and merry, and fond of society. Being very modest, he presents much better than his brother, the duke of Gandía, although the latter is also highly endowed.” Boccaccio’s words make it understandable that Alexander VI could come to dote on a youth of such promise, but even he, astute as he was, must have seen that this high-spirited, strong-willed, and lavishly talented youth, fearing nothing and no one, was not going to be easily kept on the path that had been laid out for him. He was not likely to be even briefly satisfied with the gift of a red hat, or to see in it any reason to moderate his behavior.
For a while things settled down, and the careers of all four young Borgias appeared to be coming right. Alexander rejoiced when word arrived from Spain that Duke Juan’s bride was pregnant: not only had the marriage been consummated, but an heir to the duchy of Gandía was possibly on his way. Not long afterward Cesare submitted to taking “minor” orders, first as a subdeacon and then as deacon. These were steps toward priestly ordination but did not involve the taking of permanent vows. It was not at all unusual for cardinals to be deacons only, and it was not unheard of for newly elected popes to be ordained shortly before their coronation. One rationale for this was the demands that ordination put on a man’s time and the wish to keep senior Curia officials focused on their bureaucratic responsibilities. Rodrigo Borgia himself had been a cardinal for years before finally being ordained.
Jofrè and Sancia too were giving no great cause for worry. They appeared to be settling contentedly enough into their new life as married Neapolitan royalty—a grandiose life that provided the boy-prince with scores of attendants and his bride with almost as many. As for Lucrezia, she in company with her mother and her best friend and companion Giulia Farnese Orsini, the beautiful daughter-in-law of Pope Alexander’s cousin and housekeeper Adriana del Milà, had joined her husband at Pesaro, presumably now sharing with him the conjugal bed. All seemed to be well on the domestic front.
In the wider world things were not at all well. January 1494 brought a momentous event, the death from cancer of Ferrante of Naples. As shrewd as he was cruel, as treacherous as he was skilled in statecraft, through his three and a half decades as king Ferrante had remained always at the center of Italian power politics, constantly in search of opportunities to make trouble for his rivals and frequently succeeding. His last months, however, had been steeped in dread and the expectation of ruin, the fear that everything he had spent his life preserving and everything he had accomplished was soon to be laid waste. He knew of course that Charles of France was preparing an invasion, knew that Naples was Charles’s prime objective, and foresaw all too clearly that this meant disaster. At a less troubled time the demise of such a man might have given rise to jubilation, in Naples no less than elsewhere. But not now, and especially not in Rome. With the death of Ferrante it became impossible for Alexander to continue dancing on a diplomatic tightrope between Naples and Milan—and, beyond them, between Spain and France. Suddenly all eyes were on Rome, and the question being asked was who Alexander would recognize as Ferrante’s successor. It was a repeat of what had happened in the last days of Calixtus III’s reign, with the death of Ferrante’s father.
The most obvious choice was Ferrante’s eldest son, Alfonso duke of Calabria, whom Innocent VIII had pledged to invest with the crown when Ferrante was gone. On the personal level Alfonso was unpromising material. He was at least as objectionable as his father in moral terms; Renaissance historian Jacob Burckhardt would describe him as “a savage, brutal profligate.” But he was already in place as de facto ruler of his father’s and grandfather’s kingdom, understood the precariousness of his position, and was taking swift action to get himself firmly entrenched.
He knew that, with the king of France preparing to descend upon him, he needed to organize a defense and was going to require help in doing so. Ferrante had attempted to provide him with a lasting source of help by marrying him to the daughter of one Sforza duke and his daughter to another. Thanks to Ludovico Sforza’s usurpation, however, that connection was now worse than useless. The late Pope Innocent’s pledge to install him as king was likewise useless. Other support was needed, which explains why Alfonso and Ferrante, to secure Pope Alexander’s friendship, had already bestowed rich estates, grand titles, and Sancia of Aragon on young Jofrè Borgia, endowed the duke of Gandía with a lifelong income, and granted lucrative benefices to Cardinal Cesare. The benefits of having done these things seemed almost trivial, however, when balanced against the certain knowledge that Charles VIII was preparing to invade and for that purpose was assembling an army bigger than any seen in Italy in living memory.
Alexander’s connections to the House of Aragon notwithstanding, the question of whom to anoint as Ferrante’s successor had no easy answer. Though at the urging of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere and others Charles was threatening to depose the pope, nothing could have been more obvious than his readiness to forgive and forget Alexander’s refusal to approve his invasion. In return he wanted only one thing, something that would cost the pope nothing in the near term. He wanted an assurance of papal investment as king of Naples once his campaign had succeeded. And he had much to offer in return. If as seemed likely the French army proved to be an irresistible force once it was on the march, it would place in Charles’s hands the ability to dispense rewards beyond anything that Alfonso of Naples could ever possibly offer. In any case the time for artful dodging—for positioning himself as the friend of Milan and Naples as well, or at least as the enemy of neither—had ended. Someone was going to become king of Naples, and Alexander had no choice but to place a bet.
He did so on April 18, when gathered with the cardinals in consistory. To the indignation of Ascanio Sforza and the French members of the Sacred College, he declared his intention to send a legate to Naples to crown Alfonso on his behalf without delay. Part of his motive was, almost certainly, to present King Charles with a fait accompli and thereby—with luck—discourage him from invading. Also, by showing his hand he was signaling to the other Italian rulers that the time had come for them to do the same. He underscored the point by assigning the coronation duties to his nephew and confidant Cardinal Giovanni Borgia, and by instructing him to proceed to Ferrara and Venice upon leaving Naples and encourage those cities too to come to Alfonso’s support. Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere’s response was to depart for the north, first for Milan and then on to the court of the French king. He sensed the opportunity for which he had been waiting. Now that Alexander had in effect declared himself an opponent of France, or if not that at least unwilling to acquiesce in a French conquest of Naples, the gullible Charles was more likely than ever to see the wisdom of replacing him with someone more cooperative. It need hardly be said that della Rovere was confident that the king would not have to look far to find exactly the right replacement.
Wiser men than Charles might have thought success a certainty when so many important Italians were not only encouraging him to invade but offering to join his campaign and help to finance it. Within weeks of Alexander’s decision to confer the Neapolitan crown on Alfonso II, therefore, Charles had his war machine in motion, sending all the great and petty powers of Italy scrambling to save themselves from disaster or even, should opportunities arise, to profit from the confusion and mayhem. The jealousies and conflicting ambitions that had always divided the Italian states, worsened now by panic, removed any possibility of their coming together in the common defense. Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara, who had done his best to stay clear of war since his conflict with Venice a decade before had brought his dynasty to the edge of ruin, now saw a chance to recover some of what had been lost. He not only allied his duchy with France and Milan—that was no surprise, his family having long looked to Milan for protection against Venice, and his daughter Beatrice being married to Ludovico il Moro—but sent off a son to join the French army. The Venetians, whose resources would have been sufficient to make even Charles think twice about proceeding, withdrew to a position of neutrality. Giovanni Bentivoglio, strongman of Bologna, also had the capacity to make things difficult for Charles but would continue to temporize until it was too late for his decision to matter.
Charles moved with glacial slowness at first, evidently not caring that as the weeks passed the summer was passing too and with it the best months for offensive operations. He was still at Lyons at the beginning of June, when Cardinal della Rovere caught up with him and added his insistent voice to the many urging him to press on and show no more mercy to Pope Alexander than to Alfonso II. Della Rovere, until recently on cordial terms with Naples, was now its implacable enemy thanks solely to Alfonso’s recognition by the pope. This was characteristic behavior on della Rovere’s part; he had thrown in with Charles for no better reason than that the French king was the only man in Europe able and presumably willing to tear the papal tiara from Alexander’s head. When Charles finally got his forces in motion once again, he advanced only as far as Vienne before stopping for three weeks of amusements including dalliance with the gaggle of mistresses that accompanied him wherever he went.
On June 14, at the Orsini fortress of Vicovaro northeast of Rome, a pathetically small assembly of princes and warlords gathered to explore ways of mounting a resistance. The key participants were Alfonso II and his liege lord the pope. The two devoted part of the day to a discussion so private that no one else was admitted. Also in attendance, somewhat improbably, were the chiefs of Rome’s two great baronial clans, men more experienced at fighting one another than at tangling with foreigners. Fabrizio Colonna, who shared the leadership of his family with his cousin Prospero, had come to Vicovaro in spite of having recently signed a condotta that put him on the payroll of Charles VIII. It was typical of the relaxed view that Italian warlords took of their contractual obligations that Fabrizio saw nothing wrong in exchanging views with his employer’s principal opponents, or in participating in a conference hosted by Virginio Orsini, not only chief of the Colonnas’ hated rivals but great constable, general-in-chief, of the army of Naples. One wonders what France’s romantic young king would have thought had he known that Fabrizio, whom he was paying handsomely with money borrowed on onerous terms, was now promising that neither his clan nor its junior partners the Savelli family would do anything to make trouble for Naples or the Papal States when the French attack came.
A plan of defense was agreed upon that day. Alfonso II’s son Ferrandino, who now bore his father’s old title of duke of Calabria, would take a Neapolitan army north into the Romagna to block the French from using the Apennine passes. Once in place, Ferrandino would also be positioned to protect the flank of Piero de’ Medici’s Florentine army as it sealed off the roads leading southward into Tuscany. Alfonso’s brother Don Fadrique, meanwhile, was to take Naples’s war fleet northward up the coast in an attack on the port of Genoa, to prevent the French from using it to supply and reinforce their army. Virginio Orsini assumed responsibility for keeping the French out of his family’s territories north of Rome, while Alexander was to do the same for those parts of the Papal States effectively under his rule.
The army with which Charles VIII entered Italy at the start of September 1494, numbering possibly as many as forty thousand men, was an immense force not only by Italian standards but by the European standards of the time. It was a hard army too, made up mainly of Breton and Gascon veterans and Swiss and German mercenaries. Upon crossing the Alps they would find themselves scorned as barbarians, and they would repay the contempt of the Italians with the kind of atrocious savagery that had come to northern Europe in the time of the Hundred Years’ War. They brought with them something else that the Italians had never seen: mobile heavy artillery. It was heavy by the standards of the day, at any rate, the biggest barrels being all of eight feet long. Never before in history had it been possible to transport such devastating weaponry at the speed of a walking horse and use it to batter down the high, thick fortress walls that for millennia had been virtually impregnable.
Precisely because it was so big and so awesomely equipped, Charles’s army had to do almost no real fighting. Its approach spread panic across the Lombard Plain and on southward, causing the forces mustered to resist its advance to move out of its path instead. This set off a sequence of betrayals, reversals, and defeats that threatened to go on until nothing of Italy’s old order remained. Events as they unfolded seemed almost to conspire to confirm Charles VIII’s fantasies about himself as an epic hero embarked upon God’s work and fulfilling his own magnificent destiny. His troops marched under standards bearing the words Voluntas Dei (By the Will of God) and Missus a Deo (Sent by God). These slogans were said to have been suggested by Giuliano della Rovere. He, like the king, saw impossible dreams coming true.
That the arrival of the French marked the opening of a tragic new era in Italian history was clear from the beginning. When the fleet commanded by Don Fadrique of Naples arrived too late to keep Genoa’s harbor out of the hands of a French force led by Charles VIII’s cousin Louis of Orléans, it moved on to the port of Rapallo and linked up with friendly local forces there. Just days later, however, the arrival of 2,500 of Charles’s Swiss mercenaries forced Don Fadrique to withdraw, leaving Rapallo’s garrison to be massacred and the town itself to be sacked so savagely that news of what had happened spread terror to the farthest reaches of Italy. War Italian style, in which captured towns were more likely to be ransomed than destroyed and condottieri tended to be forgiving of defeated foes because they knew that in the next little war the shoe might well turn up on the other foot, was consigned to the past.
On September 9 Charles reached the Lombard city of Asti, which had been a French outpost since being given to Louis of Orléans’s grandfather as part of the dowry of his bride Valentina Visconti. After receiving a warm welcome from Ludovico Sforza and his father-in-law Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara, Charles fell ill with smallpox. Though his case proved to be not fatal, it brought the offensive to another halt and so alarmed his court as to resurrect the old question of whether it was sensible to proceed all the way to Naples and expect that once there the French would be capable of overcoming Alfonso II’s defenses. There was talk of how much easier and more profitable it could be to simply take Milan instead. The duchy already was, after all, virtually in French hands, and every lawyer at the French court eagerly agreed that it belonged by right to Louis of Orléans, who was conveniently on the scene as one of Charles VIII’s senior commanders. Though Charles when sufficiently recovered dismissed such talk out of hand—probably he really did expect his campaign to continue until he sat on a throne in Jerusalem—Il Moro inevitably learned of it and was understandably distressed. He began to have belated second thoughts about having enticed the French to come to Italy and solve his problems.
He was given further cause for worry when Charles moved on to Pavia, second only to the city of Milan as a bastion of Visconti-Sforza strength and home of Duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza, his wife Isabella of Aragon, and their young children. The king called on the duke, who as it happened was his first cousin (their mothers were daughters of the duke of Savoy) and in his usual bad health. Duchess Isabella took the initiative, throwing herself on the king’s mercy and begging him to assure the succession of her son Francesco if his father died. Charles, who had more than the average man’s susceptibility to women as beautiful as Isabella, responded sympathetically. Though he promised nothing before moving on again, this time to Parma, Il Moro was left to brood in solitude about just how dependable a patron the king of France was likely to prove.
Charles resumed his effortless progress, with nothing to worry him except the costs of keeping his immense army paid, fed, and in tolerably good order. As city after city opened its gates without even a pretense of resistance, and in each new place Charles’s scouts marked the buildings where troops were to be billeted, it began to be said that the king was conquering Italy with a piece of chalk. The juggernaut rolled on, and as effortless victories followed one after another, the defensive confederation formed at Vicovaro began to crumble. Betrayals of Alexander and Alfonso came almost weekly. As early as September 18, when the French court was still at Asti awaiting the king’s recovery from smallpox, the Colonna had broken their chief’s promise to remain on the sidelines of the conflict at least where papal and Neapolitan territory were concerned. The cousins Fabrizio and Prospero Colonna launched a surprise attack on the Roman port of Ostia, which they had been forced to hand over to the pope earlier in the year after its governor, their patron Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, departed for France. By retaking Ostia they gave France’s warships control of the Tiber, without which Rome had no easy access to the sea. As they already controlled the main road connecting Rome to Naples, holding it in readiness for the French while blocking communications between Alexander and Alfonso, the Colonna now had the Vatican in a stranglehold.
If it is true as alleged that Ascanio Sforza persuaded the Colonna to commit this act of betrayal, the cardinal deserves credit for a tactical masterstroke. With the Colonna now positioned to do so much mischief so close to his kingdom, Alfonso II decided that he could not reinforce his son Ferrandino’s army in the Romagna. This left Ferrandino without the strength to keep the French from outflanking his army and seizing the mountain passes, and when this happened the Neapolitan army was so dangerously exposed that Alfonso ordered a general retreat. Thus the Florentines found themselves unsupported as the French bore down on them. Every setback seemed to lead to further setbacks, and the French flags flying over Ostia seemed to mock a humiliated and defenseless Pope Alexander.
Not even Ludovico Sforza could rejoice in the successes of the invasion he had instigated. When his nephew Duke Gian Galeazzo died on October 22, murder was so widely assumed that he found it necessary to send letters to his fellow princes, protesting his innocence. A supine Milanese parliament decreed that Ludovico and not Gian Galeazzo’s son Francesco was now duke, but the dire circumstances must have made this fulfillment of Il Moro’s lifelong dream much less sweet than he had expected.
In Florence, weakened by a long and inconclusive war to subdue the neighboring city of Pisa, Piero de’ Medici had even more to worry about than Il Moro. His decision to side with Naples in this crisis had been a reversal of long-standing Florentine policy, which traditionally favored France as a rich market for the city’s bankers and manufacturers. The new alignment came under increasing criticism as France imposed an embargo on Florence’s goods, causing immediate economic distress. As the French army approached, more and more influential Florentines openly questioned Piero’s judgment, questioning also the wisdom of leaving the city’s destiny in the hands of an inexperienced youth who, it was becoming obvious, was not nearly the equal of his late father Lorenzo. Piero’s position became alarming when news arrived that Charles’s mercenaries, having used false promises to extract a surrender from the defenders of the Florentine stronghold of Fivizzano, had put the entire garrison to death and subjected the town to the kind of scorched-earth sacking for which Rapallo had first made them notorious. Florence seemed doomed to a similar fate, with Piero responsible.
Perhaps it was sheer desperation, or perhaps the memory of how Lorenzo the Magnificent had once saved Florence by journeying to Naples and putting himself at the mercy of the vicious Ferrante, that prompted Piero to venture forth in search of the French king. He found him at the end of October, at Sarzana near the port of La Spezia. Instead of talking terms as his father surely would have done, however, Piero simply prostrated himself before the misshapen little conqueror. He abjectly declared himself ready not only to ally with the invaders but to hand over to them much more than they would have been likely to demand of a less craven envoy. By the time Piero stopped talking, he had given Charles free access to Florence itself and every one of the city’s satellite strongpoints. He had even given Charles the strategic port of Livorno and, more shocking still, the city of Pisa, the control of which was considered economically and militarily essential by many leading Florentines. When the citizens of Florence learned of all this, their festering resentments, the inevitable result of generations of domination by a single family, erupted in communal rage.
Their anger was brought to white heat by the denunciations of an extraordinary figure who, though an outsider who had moved to Florence only five years earlier and had done so at the invitation of Lorenzo de’ Medici, had already established himself as the spokesman and de facto leader of the city’s numerous anti-Medici factions. This was Friar Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican priest and preacher whose energy and charisma were fueled by revulsion against the hedonism and materialism of the Italy of his day, a burning hatred of the Medici and the Renaissance papacy alike, and (his most attractive feature) a conviction that Italy’s people could and should rid themselves of rule by tyrants.
On the momentous day of November 9, 1494, when Piero de’ Medici and his family were expelled from Florence, Savonarola was not present. Instead he was in Pisa, where he had gone to represent the signoria of a new Florentine republic in welcoming the French invaders. Charles VIII was received as a liberator when he entered Pisa at the head of his army that day; the Pisans were in ecstasies at having been freed—or so they believed—from Florence’s hard rule. Rather oddly, the envoy from Florence figured prominently in the festivities and took the opportunity to heap praise on the conqueror from the north. Charles, Savonarola declared, was the liberator whose arrival he had been predicting in his sermons, a messenger sent by God to cleanse Italy—wicked Florence especially, the papacy above all—of the corruption in which it had long been sunk. Of course he got an affectionate response from king and Pisans alike and upon returning to Florence was himself received as a hero, the man whose prophecies had proved accurate and who had restored both the city’s dignity and its old friendship with France.
When on November 17 Charles rode into Florence with Cardinal della Rovere at his side, they received a more mixed reception. Supporters of the Medici, especially those who resented what almost everyone was interpreting as Charles’s intervention on behalf of Pisan autonomy, looked on sullenly. But those who regarded the Medici as usurping tyrants, and Piero as a disaster, were jubilant at what they hoped would prove the dawning of a new era. Their joy was tamped down, however, when Charles revealed where his priorities lay. He told the assembled citizens that he had entered their city not as a liberator but as a conqueror, that it was a matter of no interest to him whether they were governed by the Medici or the foes of the Medici, and that what he wanted from them was what Florence had a gift for producing in abundance: money.
Charles’s position, however, proved to be not as strong as he had assumed. The sum that he demanded was so outlandish that the Florentine officials all but laughed in his face, and when he threatened to use force (“I shall sound my trumpets!”), they dared him to try (“We will ring our bells!” meaning that they would summon the people to resist). The plain fact was that Charles needed an intact and nonhostile Florence: the city lay athwart the lines of communication connecting him with the coast and with home, and if it took up arms against him, his army could be cut off. If he destroyed Florence, he would destroy with it the banking houses without which his whole enterprise might very well be doomed. And so he backed down, providing a clue as to how easily he might have been stopped if Venice, Ferrara, and Bologna had joined the resistance at the start. He accepted payment of 120,000 florins, recognized the new regime, and moved on.
Now it was the turn of Ludovico Sforza to turn traitor. Early in November, having learned that Louis of Orléans was sporting the title duke of Milan as he advanced with his troops southward toward Naples, Il Moro decided that enough was enough. He quietly dispatched his brother the cardinal to call on Pope Alexander in Rome and offer an alliance. Implicit in this, obviously, was a Milanese abandonment of Charles of France. Unfortunately for himself, however, Il Moro mistakenly believed his own position to be so strong, or the pope’s so hopeless, that he could exact an extortionate price for changing sides. On his behalf Ascanio demanded Alexander’s pledge that all future appointments to the College of Cardinals would require the duke of Milan’s approval. The pope’s response was as bold as the demand: he had Ascanio locked up.
Where were Ferdinand and Isabella while all this was transpiring? They were, in spite of the pleas for help from Alfonso of Naples and from the pope as well, in spite of their own horror at the thought of a French conquest of Naples, carefully saying and doing nothing. The only possible explanation is the Treaty of Barcelona by which Charles had bought their neutrality, surrendering two border provinces that his father had struggled mightily to make part of France. The Spanish monarchs had no wish to jeopardize such lovely acquisitions. For the time being they were satisfied to stand by, wait to see what happened, and leave both their old friend the pope and their cousin the king of Naples to manage as best they could.
Alexander expressed his view of the situation on November 9, in words of reproach addressed to Ercole d’Este’s ambassador to the papal court. “The triumph of France,” he said, “involves nothing less than the destruction of the independence of every state in Italy.” Rome itself included, of course. But Ferrara included as well, even if Duke Ercole had put himself unreservedly on France’s side. That was what the pope saw: that in this squalid affair there could be no Italian winners. Knowing that even Ludovico Sforza had grasped the truth, he probably knew also that Venice was awakening to how, by electing to remain neutral, it had jeopardized its own future.
Probably the blindest man in Italy was its new master, Charles VIII. His unimpeded progress made it unnecessary for him to see that his own high-handedness, and even more the brutality with which his troops were looting and raping as they worked their way south, were making enemies even of those who at first had welcomed him. Before leaving Florence he had issued a grandiose manifesto, declaring that his purpose was to recapture the Holy Land and end the Ottoman threat to Christendom, and that the conquest of Naples was a necessary and legitimate step in the achievement of those epic goals. Also necessary, he noted, was that the pope “grant us the same courtesy he has granted to our enemies, that is to say free passage through his territories, and the necessary provisioning, to be paid for by us.”
The subtext was unmistakable: he, King Charles, was an eminently reasonable man who wanted only what was fair, and if the pope knew what was good for him, he would be reasonable too. The king was finding reasonable people everywhere he went. Viterbo surrendered to him without a murmur of complaint. Siena did the same. Montefeltro of Urbino declared that he too was the king’s man, as did, finally, Giovanni Bentivoglio of Bologna. When the pope sent envoys, Charles refused to see them. He saw no need to negotiate with anyone.
Alexander sat alone in Rome, without options. When an opportunity arose to have Prospero Colonna taken into custody and imprisoned, he quickly seized it. It has been speculated that he hoped this act, by sparking an uprising in Ostia, would lead to the recovery of that crucial coastal city. Nothing of the kind happened, however, and the pope remained as isolated and without prospects as before.
At the beginning of December Ludovico Sforza was visited by envoys from Venice, sent to make certain that he understood just how dangerous the situation now was and to urge him to consider his next steps. A report on the meeting includes the Venetians’ verbatim account of what Il Moro had to say. It shows him to be deeply disillusioned and resolved to contribute what he can to sending the French back to France. Charles, he says, is “young and of poor judgment; he is not advised as he ought to be … The king is haughty and ambitious beyond all imagining; and he has esteem for no one … How should we have confidence in him? He has been guilty of so many cruelties and has behaved with such insolence in all those of our territories through which he has passed, that the moment cannot come quickly enough of his leaving our territory. They are evil men, and we must do all possible not to have them in our country.” He claims to be encouraging the pope to stand firm, and to be assuring Alfonso II that if he can hold out for two more months, the offensive will collapse for want of funds.
For him and for everyone involved in this fiasco, the worst still lay ahead. On December 17 Alexander was subjected to a fresh betrayal and his worst humiliation yet. It happened at the town of Nepi, not far north of Virginio Orsini’s stronghold of Bracciano. As King Charles approached, he was met by Virginio’s illegitimate son Carlo, sent to put the whole of the Orsini holdings, Bracciano and other fortresses included, at the disposal of the invaders. Thus the man who at Vicovaro had agreed to stand shoulder to shoulder with the pope so as to seal off the way to Rome was not only abandoning his ally but reinforcing the invader he had pledged to fight. Charles must have been delighted to make Bracciano his latest headquarters. Virginio for his part took off for Naples and—incredibly—continued employment as Alfonso II’s grand constable.
Ten days later the French occupied Civitavecchia, Rome’s only link to the sea since the fall of Ostia. By December 18 the whole papal court had been packed for flight, the Vatican’s treasures locked away in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Almost at the hour of departure, however, Alexander decided not to go. In the days following he was joined by Ferrandino, Alfonso II’s resourceful young son, who had an army camped just outside the city walls and was making ready to stand and fight. But on Christmas Day, after formally investing Ferrandino with the dukedom of Calabria as a gesture of gratitude and admiration, Alexander asked him to return to Naples forthwith and take his soldiers with him.
Ferrandino was furious. He thought that the pope too was defecting to the French. But Alexander insisted; there was no possibility of holding off Charles’s huge army, now nearly within sight of the hills of Rome, and any effort to do so was likely to result in the destruction of the city.
So Ferrandino grudgingly departed. Alexander opened the doors of his prison, releasing Ascanio Sforza and Prospero Colonna among others. In company with those cardinals who had remained loyal, a cadre of trusted Spanish guards, and the Ottoman prince Cem, he settled down behind the walls of the Castel to await the arrival of the French.
If attacked, he told the departing Prospero, he intended to fight.
Background
FLORENCE: AN ANTI-RENAISSANCE
WHAT THE PHYSICISTS TELL US ABOUT EVERY ACTION HAVING an equal and opposite reaction proved to be relevant to politics in the time of Charles VIII’s invasion. It found expression in the uniquely glorious city-state of Florence, which not only expelled the family that had provided its leaders for sixty years but cast aside some of the values of the Renaissance to which it more than any other place had given birth. It did these things in the course of throwing itself at the feet of a charismatic friar whom most people today would regard as not only a fanatic but seriously unbalanced.
That friar, a brilliantly gifted preacher who if not for the extremes to which he finally went might be remembered as one of the heroic figures of his time, was the same Girolamo Savonarola who had represented the new post-Medici government of Florence in welcoming King Charles at Pisa. He was not Florentine or even Tuscan by birth but a native of Ferrara, where life under the Este dukes instilled in him something close to hatred for warlord princes and their ways. He gave early evidence of being unable to accept ordinary human frailty: in 1475, after running off to enter a monastery in Bologna, he wrote to his physician father to explain that he “could not endure the corruption of the Italian people.”
After rising to become his friary’s novicemaster he was sent out as an itinerant preacher, which proved to be the perfect application of his gifts. Though short and thin and rather ugly with his great beak of a nose, from the pulpit he radiated extraordinary power. His appeal grew out of the passionate conviction with which he spoke, and his use of a direct, colloquial style devoid of the polished and formal rhetoric taught at the universities of the time. His travels took him to Florence in the early 1480s, but whatever his message was at that point, the sophisticated Florentines found little of interest in it. Having fallen flat, he moved on.
When he was thirty-seven, Savonarola was heard speaking by the philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Impressed with what the friar had to say about the need for reform of both the Church and civic life, Pico wrote to Lorenzo de’ Medici reporting that he had discovered a jewel, a man so electrifying that he should be persuaded to take up residence in Florence. Lorenzo, barely forty years old but in his twentieth year as de facto head of the Florentine state, acted on his friend’s suggestion. Thus it became the supreme irony of Lorenzo’s life that at his initiative Florence became the home of the man destined to bring the long rule of his family to an end and undo, if temporarily, much of his life’s work.
The Florence that welcomed Savonarola back in 1489 was fully formed physically and culturally, already the beautiful place that today draws millions of visitors from around the world and home to an extraordinary assortment of artists and thinkers. Though the Tuscan hills in which the city is set have few natural resources and are not nearly as fruitful as the flatlands of Lombardy to the north, over the centuries the enterprising Florentines had become pioneers in the manufacture of cloth (an industry employing fully a third of the city’s population) as well as in banking and trade. Its merchants introduced Arabic numerals to the West, and the innovations of its bankers included international letters of credit and Europe’s first gold currency. Florence’s little coins, called florins, each contained precisely seventy-two grains of gold and became the preferred medium of exchange throughout Europe. When the Venetians began producing the ducat, they made them identical to the florin in gold content and therefore interchangeable with them. Other states followed suit in introducing their own gold coins.
Experience in commerce taught the Florentines the value of prudence, precision, and a reputation for honesty, and so simple self-interest caused them to become a prudent, precise, and honest people. In the Middle Ages, once they had fought free of the Holy Roman emperors, they established republican institutions in which all members of the various trade and professional guilds had the rights of citizens, guild membership was open to qualified newcomers, and membership in the governing group known as thesignoria was chosen by lot every two months. Florence’s feudal nobility, meanwhile, was denied citizenship and thereby neutered politically. The resulting regime was far from being a utopia; slavery was lawful, only a minority of adult males were guild members and therefore citizens, and bloodshed was all too common as family fought family for advantage or on points of honor. But as the fifteenth century advanced, Florence remained one of the few republics not to fall under the control of tyrannical warlord clans. Instead, as a kind of evolving compromise made necessary by the need for continuity and a strong executive, the city’s political institutions gradually subordinated themselves first to a wily banker named Cosimo de’ Medici, then to his son Piero from 1464 to 1469, and thereafter to Piero’s son Lorenzo.
The wealth, worldliness, and fixation on classical culture that Savonarola encountered upon returning to Florence were all, in his eyes, symptoms of moral rot. The ethical and sexual standards of a pleasure-seeking population he saw as decadence. His call for a purifying of the whole culture, delivered in an earnest and plainspoken style that was a novelty in a time of preachers and orators schooled in classical rhetoric, began to attract large and receptive audiences. Success increased the vehemence of his pronouncements, and his condemnation of the world he saw around him grew more and more extreme. No doubt encouraged by the rivals of the Medici, he blamed Lorenzo for the paganism into which Florence, he said, had fallen. He predicted that not only Lorenzo but also Pope Innocent and Ferrante of Naples would soon be in hell. When the first two expired in 1492 and Ferrante followed in 1494, Savonarola’s credibility was vastly enhanced. He prophesied also that God would soon send a great power to purge Italy and the Church, and when Charles VIII’s army came down out of the alpine passes, the credulous were convinced that the friar did indeed speak for the Almighty. When Piero de’ Medici’s abject submission to Charles of France caused him and his family to be sent fleeing from their home, it was Savonarola who got the credit for saving Florence from destruction. His popularity rose to such frenzied heights that the entire state was his to command. The young Michelangelo heard him speak and was as impressed as everyone else. Half a century later he would say that he could still hear Savonarola’s words ringing in his ears.
The friar was not a charlatan or a hypocrite and by no means an entirely bad man. He was not an enemy of classical learning to the same extent as, say, the English Puritans of a century later; those zealots would have burned the great Medici library rather than taking pains, as Savonarola did, to save it from the French. They certainly never would have approved his friendship with many of the city’s leading artists. Under Savonarola’s influence, Florence achieved something much closer to truly democratic government than had ever been possible under the Medici, and his reforms included such things as a cooperative lending society to protect people in need of credit from being exploited.
But perhaps it is in the nature of such men to be drawn by their own success into increasingly extreme positions. Certainly it was in Savonarola’s nature. The things he would do in progressing from criticism of Rome to an attack on the legitimacy of the Church’s authority, and the way in which the pope responded, provide very nearly the best insight we have into just what kind of man Alexander VI was.