13
The meeting of King Charles VIII and Pope Alexander VI, when it finally took place in Rome in the first week of January 1495, was an encounter in which all the important advantages appeared to lie on one side.
Charles, for all his youth and inexperience and foolishness, was ruler of one of the two mightiest kingdoms in Europe and in the preceding few months had made himself master of half of Italy as well. He commanded an army so fearsome that it had been obliged to fight no real battles as it worked its way down the peninsula; no one could see any point in attempting to stop it.
Alexander by contrast had nothing with which to oppose the invaders except whatever value was to be found in the prestige of his ancient office. He had opened Rome’s gates to the French for the most practical of reasons: because in military terms he was powerless, utterly without means of defense. Aside from Ferrandino of Naples, every supposed friend with the capacity to provide help had either defected to the enemy or declared a neutrality that amounted to acceptance of French domination. His decision not to flee as Rome fell into the hands of a king committed to deposing him must have seemed an act less of courage than of madness—or perhaps of abject surrender.
And yet the results of their encounter would demonstrate, as eloquently as anything in history, that brute power is not always everything. That there are times, even in the realm of international power politics, when a strong man can bend a weak man to his will even when he has few resources to draw on beyond the force of his own personality.
Though units of the French army were inside the walls of Rome by December 27, Charles delayed his own entry until New Year’s Eve, a day approved by his astrologers. Led by 2,500 nobles on horseback, the great army arrived at the Porta del Popolo at the north end of the city at three in the afternoon and continued to stream through the gates until nine that night. The people of the city looked on in wonder as, hour after hour, they were passed by foot soldiers and cavalry from Switzerland and Germany, from Brittany and Gascony, and by dozens of horse-drawn guns. At the king’s side rode Cardinals Ascanio Sforza and Giuliano della Rovere, and immediately behind them came Cardinals Colonna and Savelli, members of two of the baronial clans that had abandoned the pope and entered the service of the French. Crowds that at first had gathered out of simple curiosity were soon swept up by the spectacle, shouting “Francia! Francia!” and “Colonna! Colonna!” What had to be most bitter to Pope Alexander, if he could hear it from his perch high in the Castel, they also shouted “Vincoli! Vincoli!” This was a salute to the man most unalterably committed to the Borgia pope’s destruction, Giuliano della Rovere, cardinal of Rome’s San Pietro in Vincoli Church. Hearing his companions saluted in this way must have confirmed for Charles that he had allied himself with the right faction of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
As he commandeered for a headquarters Rome’s most magnificent residence, the Palazzo San Marco that had once been the home of Pope Paul II and now belonged to his nephew Cardinal Marco Barbo, Charles released his troops to pillage the part of the city that lay across the river from the Vatican. The palaces of cardinals who had not declared their support of the invasion became prime targets, and the homes of a number of Borgias—Cesare and Lucrezia’s mother included—were stripped bare. Alexander meanwhile made no effort to see the king. He sent three cardinals in his place, instructing them to point out to Charles the advantages of doing business with a sitting pope rather than trying to put a new one in his place. He empowered them to agree to any arrangement that left him secure in the Vatican and did not recognize Charles as king of Naples.
Charles at this point saw no need to concede anything and was encouraged to think so by the eight cardinals now attached to his court. With a decree for Alexander’s deposition already drawn up and ready for his signature, he gave Alexander’s envoys a set of demands to carry back to the Vatican. The pope, if he wanted talks, would first have to surrender the Castel Sant’Angelo, his only defensible stronghold. He would also have to hand over his prisoner Cem, the brother of Ottoman sultan Bayezid II, a valuable hostage and a potent symbol of resistance to the sultan’s rule. Finally, Alexander was instructed to assign Cardinal Cesare Borgia as legate to the French court; obviously this meant surrendering Cesare as a hostage. Charles must have been taken aback when the pope, from where he was holed up in the Castel with Cem, a small group of cardinals including Cesare, and a company of troops, rejected every one of his demands out of hand. If the splendor of his entry into Europe’s most fabled city had encouraged the king to think that the pope was his to command, he was being disabused.
During the standoff that ensued, Charles amused himself with visits to the principal churches and pilgrimage sites of Rome. Though his commanders set up gallows in public places as a caution to their troops to control themselves, the soldiers largely ignored them, regarding the right to pillage as one of the fringe benefits of their trade. Some of the French cannons were hauled up within range of the Castel but stood ominously quiet. The pope’s show of defiance took on a farcical note when, without a shot having been fired, a section of the Castel’s massive but decayed outer wall spontaneously collapsed into the Tiber, opening a hole through which the French could almost certainly have forced their way. Instead, however, king and pope began to negotiate through intermediaries and by mid-January came to an understanding. Charles got things that Alexander had no way of denying him: freedom of passage through the Papal States and possession of the papal fortresses at Civitavecchia, Terracina, Viterbo, and Spoleto. Additionally, Alexander agreed to hand over Prince Cem—but only on condition that he and not Charles would continue to receive the forty thousand ducats that the Ottoman sultan paid annually to prevent his brother from being set free. Charles wanted the prince as a trophy, evidently—one whom he could put on display when he set out to conquer Constantinople. Alexander agreed also to send Cesare to Charles as a legate-hostage. More significant were the things that Charles did not get: surrender of the Castel, recognition of himself as king of Naples, or a repudiation of the kingship of Alfonso II. The one bitter pill the pope had to swallow was the king’s demand that all the cardinals who had supported him in his invasion be granted amnesty, including the restoration of their property and offices. In context, however, this was of limited importance. It was made easier by the fact that Alexander was throughout his life a forgiving rather than a vindictive man.
Charles now abandoned all thought of deposing Alexander or trying to curtail the powers that had come to him with the papal crown. Instead he became intent on showing himself to be the pope’s faithful subject. The two met for the first time the day after the terms of their agreement were settled, and they did so in a theatrical fashion that had been carefully choreographed in advance. It was arranged that the pope would be carried in a sedan chair from the Castel to the Vatican gardens, where Charles would come upon him, supposedly deep in prayer. Charles would then fall to one knee not once but repeatedly, his third genuflection serving as Alexander’s cue to take notice, raise him to his feet, and greet him as a son. Whereupon, also by prearrangement, Charles would ask that his chief minister Briçonnet be made a cardinal, Alexander would not only agree but invite Charles to come live in the Vatican, and their reconciliation would be complete.
All went according to the script, and with Charles now under his roof the pope had time to apply the full force of his charm to the cementing of their friendship. He was, as usual, successful. When even the king’s appearance at consistory and direct appeal failed to win a promise of recognition, he nevertheless remained in thrall to his host. He lowered himself to the floor, kissed Alexander’s foot, and said he had come to Rome “to offer obedience and homage to your Holiness, as my predecessors the kings of France had done before me.” A member of his entourage, the president of the parlement of France, then read out a declaration that Charles acknowledged Alexander to be Christ’s vicar on earth and the successor to Saint Peter. The king’s reward for thus freeing Alexander from the greatest danger facing him was, by comparison, rather paltry. The only addition to the things that the pope had conceded before their meeting was another French seat in the College of Cardinals, a red hat for Charles’s cousin Philip of Luxembourg.
It was enough. In the days following, Alexander and Charles were together almost constantly, touring the city on horseback and giving no evidence of disagreeing about anything. The cardinals who had ridden into Rome as part of the king’s entourage, by contrast, were left to absorb the bewildering fact that they had been, if not exactly betrayed, inexplicably denied the great prizes that had seemed within their grasp. An exasperated Ascanio Sforza departed for Milan as soon as he saw that Charles and the pope had settled their differences. Giuliano della Rovere remained in Rome, but only in the hope that something might still be salvaged from the wreckage of his dreams.
When Charles departed for Naples on January 28, taking Prince Cem, Cesare Borgia, and Cardinal della Rovere with him, he had nothing to show for his weeks in Rome except the two hostages and a promise of unimpeded passage through the Papal States that his big army would have been perfectly capable of doing without. The main part of that army had been preceded out of Rome by an advance force under the command of the condottiere Fabrizio Colonna, whose path took him first through territories belonging to various branches of his family and then into the Abruzzi region. Now he was on Neapolitan ground, but even here he encountered no significant resistance. The local barons, with their memories of two generations of abuse at the hands of Alfonso II and his father Ferrante, could not have been less interested in fighting to defend the House of Aragon. Any who might have been so inclined were cowed not only by the size of the invasion force but by fast-spreading reports of how, throughout their long advance, King Charles’s troops had shown themselves prepared to employ mass murder wherever they met with even the threat of opposition.
The town of L’Aquila, upon learning of the approach of Fabrizio Colonna, opened its gates and hoisted a French flag. Sulmona did the same, and then Popoli. Soon the whole of Il Regno was in turmoil, with the lords of town after town declaring themselves faithful to the French crown. King Alfonso, an experienced soldier and the one man to whom every Neapolitan soldier looked for leadership, went almost catatonic with fear. A legend would arise to the effect that he was haunted at night by visions of the countless people he had destroyed in the course of his ignoble career and sank into a slough of remorse. He roused himself enough not to rally his troops but to have a flotilla of galleys loaded with as many of his treasures as could be crammed aboard, at which point he abdicated in favor of his son Ferrandino and sailed away to Sicily, a safe haven securely in the hands of Spain. His departure came five days before Charles so much as left Rome. The twenty-five-year-old Ferrandino, who gave promise of being a better man and king than his father or grandfather, threw himself into organizing a defense. At every step he found his efforts impeded by the hatred of his subjects for the dynasty he now headed.
Charles, on his second night out of Rome, halted at the town of Velletri in the Alban Hills. Upon awaking the next morning, he and his entourage discovered that Cesare was nowhere to be found. They eventually learned that a local nobleman had shown him a secret passageway out of the rocca and that he had slipped away in the middle of the night disguised as a stableboy. The escape, an early expression of Cesare’s inability to be submissive to anyone, violated the terms of the pope’s agreement with the king. Horsemen carried complaints back to Alexander, who responded with profuse apologies and assurances that he was no less surprised than Charles and had no idea where Cesare might be. (In fact he had gone to Spoleto and would quietly remain there for almost two months.) King Charles’s men fell greedily upon the wagons containing the baggage that Cesare had brought with him from Rome. They discovered to their disgust that they had been tricked yet again: under their rich coverings the wagons were heaped with rubbish.
The king was still at Velletri when envoys of Spain rode into his encampment and demanded an audience. Ferdinand by this point was deeply uneasy about the dispatches he was receiving from Italy and had run out of patience. He could never have accepted a restoration of French rule in Naples and had been so taken aback at the ease with which Charles VIII was bringing all Italy to its knees that he was now transferring troops from Spain to Sicily with instructions to make ready for action on the mainland. What his ambassadors delivered at Velletri was a stern warning for Charles: his campaign was in violation of the Treaty of Barcelona, which reserved to Spain the right to protect the Papal States. They demanded that the port of Ostia be restored to Alexander, that Cesare Borgia be released (not knowing that the young cardinal had seen to that himself), and that the advance on Naples be brought to an immediate halt. When Charles made it clear that he took none of this seriously, his visitors tore up their copy of the Barcelona pact and threw it at his feet. The chronicles tell us that “high words” were exchanged before their departure.
And so Charles resumed his southward journey, his army continuing to meet with no serious resistance but spreading devastation everywhere it went. He allowed the Colonna to use the troops for which he was paying to lay waste to the fortresses, homes, and orchards of their old enemies the Conti. His mercenaries continued to take looting and rapine as their right. When the rocca at San Giovanni was annoyingly slow to submit, its garrison of almost nine hundred men was put to the sword, the town burned to the ground. The new King Ferrandino, having had no time for a coronation, was attempting to form a line of defense at Capua when reports of a revolt in his capital obliged him to gallop off to the south. As soon as he was out of sight, Capua surrendered to the invaders, and Gaeta did the same three days later. Ferrandino returned on February 21. Finding Capua in enemy hands, and no support anywhere, he accepted the hopelessness of the situation and took ship for the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. Soon thereafter he was with his father in Sicily, having taken his half-sister Sancia and her husband Jofrè Borgia with him. Within twenty-four hours of his flight Charles VIII passed in triumph through the gates of Naples, where he was welcomed by cheering crowds. They hailed him for delivering the city from decades of tyranny and terror. And his arrival was, in its way, an extraordinary achievement. He had taken possession of the largest state in Italy, long one of the richest and most powerful in all Europe, without having to fight a single battle worthy of the name, almost without having to fire a round from one of his great brass guns. Italy had collapsed at his feet like a house of cards.
Cem, who had ridden into Naples just behind the king, a living symbol of the crusade against his brother that supposedly lay just ahead, was found dead in his bed three days later. Years later, when the campaign to demolish the reputation of the Borgias was fully under way and no rumor was too outlandish to be set down in print, it would be alleged that the prince, who at the time of his death had been a pampered prisoner for some thirteen years, must have been poisoned. And that the poisoner could of course have been none other than Alexander VI—who else? If reminded that Cem had died approximately one month after the pope handed him over to the French, the accusers would respond that obviously the Borgias possessed the secret of some delayed-action poison, some concoction capable of suddenly felling its victims weeks after being ingested.
In fact it is not at all unlikely that Cem died of natural causes, having lived a life of relentless self-indulgence throughout his captivity. His death, far from benefiting the pope, deprived the pope not only of an enormous annual stipend but of a powerful diplomatic weapon, one that even in French hands could have been used to threaten the Ottoman sultan and keep his aggressions in check. The only European prince who could possibly have wanted that death was the king who had taken Cem to Naples and in whose custody the prince had spent his last weeks. Cem was to have been the figurehead behind which Charles would lead his assault on the Turks—assuming that Charles still wanted to push on to Jerusalem.
That was not an entirely safe assumption. Cem’s corpse was barely cold before Charles announced that the crusade would have to be called off. The pope’s response to this change of plans was interesting: he authorized Ferdinand of Spain to impose a special tax on church properties within his domains, in order to build ships to be used against the Turks. This was probably an oblique rebuke to Charles VIII for abandoning the great purpose that supposedly had taken him to Naples. It may also have been a way of helping Ferdinand to muster the resources needed for war with France.
Over the next three months Charles VIII earned the contempt in which he has ever since been held. Having been received as a hero by the people and nobility of Naples, he proceeded in an impressively short time to alienate virtually all of his new subjects. Having brought Italy to its knees, he then conducted himself so atrociously as to provoke the states he had so easily subdued to take up arms. He surrendered to the seductions of a licentious Neapolitan capital and a glorious Neapolitan spring, wallowing in the pleasures of the flesh while his troops preyed on a helpless population and the hundreds of French nobles in his entourage treated themselves to every office, title, and estate they could find an excuse to claim. As outrage followed outrage, Naples’s joy at the fall of the House of Aragon turned first to annoyance and then into smoldering rage. In due course it burst into flame as the Neapolitans became determined to rid themselves of the intruders.
Charles, blissfully distracted, remained oblivious. Ferdinand of Spain meanwhile had ambassadors at all the major capitals, and under his instructions they encouraged the various princes to imagine the consequences of a continued French presence in Italy and to understand that such a fate was not inevitable. Milan was receptive, Ludovico Sforza needing no one to tell him that he had blundered, and the Venetians were aware by now that what had happened to Naples could happen to them as well. Even in faraway England, King Henry VII was prepared to contribute to keeping France from growing stronger than it already was, and Maximilian of Hapsburg had not only the Holy Roman Empire to protect from France but a deep personal grudge dating back to the time when Charles had simultaneously jilted his daughter and stolen his fiancée, depriving him of the great duchy of Brittany. As for the pope, his position could not have been clearer; he was the only leader in Italy neither to have thrown himself at Charles’s feet nor to have fled at the approach of his army. When in March a congress was convened in Venice, all of the above attended or sent representatives. In short order they formed what they named their Holy League. Its members pledged to remain allied for twenty-five years—not one of them could have thought that possible—and to contribute thousands of troops to the formation of an army the sole purpose of which would be to drive the French back to France.
Charles, convinced by his successes that he was invincible, was slow to awaken to what was happening. His only political interest at this point was the old one of getting the pope to invest him with his new crown. When a new round of appeals proved as futile as the ones he had made personally while in Rome, and when the things he offered in return for investiture grew more and more lavish but still produced no response, the realization finally dawned that his position was not as solid as he had supposed. His initial response was not, however, either to reinforce that position or to prepare for an orderly withdrawal. Instead he staged an elaborate ceremony at the Naples cathedral at which, to the acclaim of nobody except his own hangers-on, he crowned himself as monarch of Il Regno and “Emperor of the East.” Even he was beginning to have some sense of the growing dangers of his situation, however, and to see the absurdity of his self-coronation. He sent ambassadors to Rome with an offer he hoped would be impossible to refuse. In return for cooperating, Alexander would receive an annual tribute of fifty thousand ducats, repayment of the hundred thousand ducats that Naples had owed to the Vatican since the time of Ferrante and Alfonso II, and the promise of a French-led crusade against the Turks. Alexander’s refusal made it impossible to doubt that, with all the Italian states now rallying against him, Charles was no longer safe so far from home. Preparations began, in haste, for an escape.
Charles departed Naples on May 20, taking with him half of what remained of his army after six months of casualties, desertions, and disease. With him went also the perfect symbol of just what kind of expedition his foray into Italy had been: a vast procession of mules—estimates of their number run as high as ten thousand—each laden with treasure stripped from all the places through which the French and their mercenaries had passed. In Rome, meanwhile, an annoyed Alexander was calling the attention of the Holy League to the failure of every member state except Venice to provide the troops that all had pledged. Only two of the states of central and northern Italy had no reason to fear what might happen when Charles returned from Naples. One was Ferrara, whose Duke Ercole hated Venice far too much to enter any league to which it belonged. The other was Florence, now more than ever dominated by Friar Savonarola, who in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary continued to insist that the king of France was God’s own agent in Italy.
The whole peninsula was in turmoil as the French retraced the path they had taken the previous year. In Rome, the question of whether the pope and his court should stay or go was debated ad nauseam. The consensus of the cardinals was that all of them should stay in place, and this opinion was reinforced when Charles wrote suggesting a meeting and promising to keep his troops under better control this time. Alexander, however, thought it a mistake to receive the king again, seeing no way to do so without arousing suspicion among the other members of the Holy League. He knew that the immense task of keeping the French troops fed would prevent Charles from halting them at Rome for more than a few days, so that eluding him would pose no great challenge. And so when Charles arrived on June 1, he was, in keeping with Alexander’s instructions, received with full honors and invited to take up residence in the Vatican once again. But the pope himself was not on hand; he had left for Orvieto. When Charles sent horsemen racing to bring him back, they arrived at Orvieto only to learn that Alexander had moved on again, this time to Perugia, well out of the way of the road back to France. Charles was as good as his word where the conduct of his troops was concerned; the now-infamous Swiss were not allowed near the city walls, and the others were confined to their encampments. And as the pope had foreseen, Charles moved out again less than forty-eight hours after his arrival. He knew that Venetian and Milanese troops were coming together in anticipation of a showdown, and that he would be lucky to get home without a fight.
And so on they went, with speed now the priority and Charles making little effort to maintain the good order that he had imposed upon his troops while in Rome. French marauders all but wiped the town of Toscanella off the map. The Swiss did much the same to Pontremoli. Avoiding Florence and its tiresomely demanding republican government, Charles chose a route that took him first through Siena and then to Pisa, where he was obliged to pause long enough to permit a delegation of the city’s womenfolk, all weeping theatrically, to beg him to save them from falling back under Florentine control. He said just enough to give them hope that their appeals would not go unheeded, thereby contradicting his most recent assurances to Florence, and departed with as much haste as decorum allowed. Something worse than wailing ladies was awaiting him at Poggibonsi: the gallingly fearless and obsessed Savonarola, who had traveled from Florence so as not to miss the opportunity to berate Charles for failing to fulfill the mission on which God had sent him from France. Here we see Savonarola at the point when he is beginning to be tinged with madness, proclaiming himself the instrument through which God gives the rest of the human race its marching orders. The king’s divine assignment, Savonarola declared, had been not to make himself king of Naples, not to launch a crusade, but to cleanse Italy, the Church, and Rome. “You have incurred the wrath of God,” he told Charles, “by neglecting that work of reforming the Church which, by my mouth, he had charged you to undertake, and to which he had called you by so many unmistakable signs. This time you will escape from the danger which threatens you; but if you again disregard the command which he now, through me his unworthy slave, reiterates, and still refuse to take up the work which he commits to you, I warn you that he will punish you with far more terrible misfortunes, and will choose another man in your place.”
This is the Savonarola who, back home in Florence, will soon be condemning even the most innocuous forms of petty gambling, not only immodest but costly dress, even racing. Who will be organizing the boys of Florence into vigilante gangs that bring to mind the Red Guards of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, sending them out to disrupt card games, confiscate musical instruments and diversions as innocent as magnifying glasses, and either attack or report whatever forbidden amusement they find. In time he will be advocating the death penalty for anyone who supports tyranny—which means anyone foolish enough to speak favorably of the Medici—and the stoning and burying alive of anyone found guilty of sodomy (for which the penalty had previously been a fine of fifty ducats). The carnival preceding Lent will be cleansed of drinking and revelry, becoming instead an occasion for Savonarola’s famous Bonfires of the Vanities—his public burning of great heaps of clothing, books, jewelry, games, and works of art deemed unacceptable. A visiting Venetian merchant will offer 22,000 ducats for the treasures laid on one of Savonarola’s pyres and will be scornfully refused.
A noose, meanwhile, was tightening around King Charles’s frail neck. One after another the fortresses that had welcomed him on his way south locked their gates against his return, and he could spare neither the time nor the manpower to break down their defenses. The great worry was the high passes through the Apennine Mountains—the danger that his army would not get through them before being set upon by Holy League forces assembling on the Lombard Plain. Once clear of the passes, Charles would be able to make a run for Asti, where by merging his army with that of his cousin Louis of Orléans he would once again be strong enough to repel any attackers. Inexplicably, the league’s commander in chief, Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua, held back until the French had put the passes behind them and were able to regroup in open country. Then, when Gonzaga finally attacked, he did so across the River Taro, throwing away all the advantages of having the larger, fresher army.
The ensuing battle of Fornovo was the bloodiest to have taken place on Italian soil in two and a half centuries, but it lasted only a single hour: an initial clash that after only fifteen minutes left the French in command of the field, followed by forty-five minutes during which the victors ran down and butchered all the fleeing Italians they could catch. When it was over, as many as 3,500 Italian troops lay dead, against perhaps two hundred French. Both sides, however, would claim victory. The Italians would point to their capture of Charles’s thousands of mule-loads of booty, including the souvenir that King Charles was said to treasure most: an album of pictures of many of the ladies whose intimate favors he had enjoyed before, during, and after his brief reign in Naples. In the end Charles would take back with him to France little more than his own skin, still luckily intact.
The people of Naples, impressed with the courage of their exiled young king and realizing that he could not possibly be worse than Charles of France, welcomed Ferrandino’s return with no less approval than they had showered on his enemies four months earlier. The speed of his return was made possible by support from the Holy League, the seasoned troops that Ferdinand of Spain was sending over from Sicily, and even by Fabrizio and Prospero Colonna, who had signed a condotta offered by Ferrandino almost immediately after their discharge by the French. The army of occupation that Charles had left behind under the command of the count of Montpensier, meanwhile, was broken up to garrison so many small and scattered strongholds that its doom was all but inevitable.
One final drama remained to be played out. Fittingly, it involved yet another betrayal—another pair of betrayals, to be precise. First, soon after reaching the safety of Asti, Charles worked out a deal by which, in return for a substantial payment in gold, he abandoned Pisa to the Florentines. Next he moved on to Turin, where a surprising pair of guests came to call. These were Ludovico il Moro, his onetime host and ally and currently his enemy, and Ludovico’s wife Beatrice d’Este. The result, hastily arrived at, was the Peace of Vercelli. By its terms Charles restored the captured city of Novara to Milan, an essentially trivial concession because the French position there was untenable, and received in return an impressive number of good things. Ludovico abandoned Milan’s longstanding claim to Genoa, thereby providing the French with a solid foothold on Italy’s northwest coast. He also agreed that Louis of Orléans could keep Asti and pledged to support France in any conflict with Venice. What was most shocking, he promised to assist Charles in any future invasion of Italy.
This separate peace reduced the Holy League to the shambles it had always been fated to become. Soon the Italians were at one another’s throats as before, with Florence, for example, sending out troops to attack not only Pisa but Siena as well. The concessions made by Il Moro and his strong-willed young duchess repaired Charles’s fortunes to such an extent that, his army replenished with freshly bought Swiss mercenaries and his fleet safe at Genoa, he might have found it possible to remain south of the Alps and begin rebuilding his position there. But he had had enough, at least for the time being. Before the end of the year he was back in France, and the first chapter in the long and tragic story that would come to be known as the Italian Wars had reached its ambiguous end.
It is too easy to heap scorn on Ludovico and Beatrice Sforza for so eagerly coming to terms with a weakened and retreating French king. They could have done otherwise only by trusting that if Charles invaded again, he would not make an unfaithful and demonstrably unfriendly Milan his first target. And that, in the event of such an invasion, their neighbors would come to their aid. They would have had to be deeply foolish to believe that the Venetians would do any such thing, rather than satisfying their hunger for the great breadbasket that was Lombardy. Nor was it reasonable to expect that Ferrandino of Naples, remembering how the Sforzas had abandoned his father, would ever risk anything for the benefit of Milan. With the single exception of the pope, no prince in all Italy had shown himself inclined to risk anything, or for that matter forgo any possible gains, for the sake of a league holy or otherwise.
Charles VIII’s great adventure had changed nothing and everything. Naples remained in possession of the House of Aragon and under the protection of Spain. Florence remained a client of France. Alexander had not been deposed, and a council of the Church had not been convened. But in the long run other things would prove to be more important. France had discovered Italy—had discovered the Renaissance—and would never be the same. Its nobles had seen what a treasure house Italy was and knew now how absurdly incapable it was of defending itself.
The Italians, who should have learned that their survival depended on cooperation, instead decided that it was folly to trust one another. Alfonso II, a feared military commander, had run away without a fight. Venice had remained on the sidelines until it was safe to do otherwise and had joined the Holy League largely in the hope of poaching the land of its neighbors. The Orsini had changed sides, the Colonna had changed sides, and Florence and Milan had changed sides twice.
One state only had taken a stand early and stood firm even as its situation came to seem hopeless. That state was Rome, the steadiness of which was entirely the work of Alexander VI.
Having survived the first great crisis of his reign, Alexander now found himself able to turn his attention to other matters. That not all such matters would be of his choosing became clear in December, when another of the Tiber’s periodic floods transformed much of the city into a filthy lake, leaving hundreds dead and whole districts in ruins. It was a fitting conclusion to a gruesomely eventful year.
Background
THE PATERNITY QUESTION: AN “APOLOGY”
FOR FIVE HUNDRED YEARS IT HAS BEEN PRETTY MUCH UNIVERSALLY understood—accepted is the better word—that Cesare Borgia and his siblings were Alexander VI’s children. The story of how the pope fathered these and other offspring during his decades as vice-chancellor of the Roman Catholic Church, schooling them to become moral monsters, has always been the cornerstone of the Borgia legend. More than half a century has passed since the last time anyone questioned it in print, only to be, like those few who had done the same thing earlier, almost completely ignored before being forgotten. It is nonetheless the opinion of the author of the present work, after examination of all the source materials of which he has knowledge:
That although it long ago became impossible to establish the truth beyond possibility of doubt, it appears that Cesare and his siblings were not—indeed almost could not have been—the children of Rodrigo Borgia.
That the familiar story of how over a period of some ten years the vice-chancellor of the Roman Catholic Church maintained an intimate relationship with a shadowy mistress named Vannozza, becoming the proud father of a large family while nobody took notice in even the most gossipy chronicles and diplomatic reports of the time, becomes all but incredible when evidence to the contrary is given its proper weight.
That though there was a Vannozza, and though she was the mother of as many as four Borgia sons and three Borgia daughters (see this page for more on her), she was not Rodrigo’s mistress but the wife and then the widow of one Guillen Ramón Lanzol y de Borja, eldest son of Rodrigo’s sister Juana.
That Vannozza and her children—most and probably all of whom were conceived and born in Spain while Rodrigo was in Italy—were taken into Cardinal Rodrigo’s care after Guillen Ramón’s death around 1481, and that in the years following all were brought to Rome except the eldest son, Pedro Luis (quite possibly so named in memory of Cardinal Rodrigo’s deceased brother), who remained in Spain to pursue a career at the royal court.
And that, although much about Rodrigo’s personal life is unknown, it is unproven that at any point either before or after his election as pope he had a mistress, fathered a child, or was involved in even a brief sexual relationship with anyone male or female.
This is not to say that no such thing ever happened, or that it was improbable considering the times, or that our understanding of Rodrigo would be radically altered if we learned that several such things had happened. It is simply to point out that, in connection with this as with so many other questions, where the Borgias are concerned too many things have always been assumed to be true for which satisfactory evidence does not exist. That having been said, it becomes necessary to acknowledge that the opinions expressed above, being so far at variance with what is generally believed of the Borgias, obviously require defense and explanation. The defense begins with the contents of a deeply obscure work with the intriguing title Material for a History of Pope Alexander VI, His Relatives and His Times, by a long-forgotten researcher named Peter De Roo.
Anyone who does a good deal of reading in the history of the Borgias is sure to notice, sooner or later, scattered references to De Roo. Such references are uncommon and invariably brief and oblique; where the existence of Material is noted, it is almost alwaysonly noted, without comment. A rare exception is Michael Mallett, who includes in the bibliography of his 1969 book The Borgias two references to De Roo, describing his work first as “a vast collection of Vatican documents,” then, in a different context, as a “vast apologetic work in which useful material is often almost undetectable under the coat of whitewash.”
Mallett’s repetition of “vast” is appropriate: at five volumes, three of them well over five hundred pages long, Material is a physically substantial achievement, without parallel in the literature of the Borgias. It seems unlikely that De Roo himself would have objected to the use of the word apologetic, defined in the traditional sense of a defense of a position and not as an offering of apologies. He says forthrightly that his researches into Alexander’s life and career, motivated in the beginning by curiosity about whether there was anything to be said in defense of a man assumed to be “totally depraved,” ultimately persuaded him that his subject had in fact been “a man of good moral character and an excellent pope.” That is his thesis, and he makes no secret of it.
Mallett is misleading, however, in calling Material a collection of Vatican documents—so wrong as to make one wonder if he examined it closely. The hundreds of documents that make Material so voluminous were found in archives across Europe, from Spain to Vienna, as well as in a number of Italian depositories. As for the comment about whitewash, it seems a dubious way of characterizing a work in which the author lays out what Mallett himself describes as “useful material” with exhaustive completeness, offering his own understanding of what that material means but also going to sometimes tiresome lengths to provide the reader with every possible means of drawing his own conclusions.
De Roo’s conclusions are at odds with one aspect after another of the established Borgia myth. This is most strikingly true with respect to the personal life of Alexander VI, starting with the assumption that he was the father of Cesare and Lucrezia plus five or six or nine or whatever number of additional offspring. An answer to the question of why De Roo published only “material for” a life of Alexander, rather than writing that life himself, is suggested by what little is known of his own story. He was born in 1839, which means that he was eighty-five when Material was published in Belgium and the United States in 1924. He writes of spending some thirty years, off and on, gathering his documents. Perhaps he waited too long to begin a biography, finding himself at last unable to do more than organize what he had collected, add his commentary, and send it all off to be printed. In any case he was dead less than two years after publishing the fruit of his labors.
The first volume, at more than six hundred pages, amounts to a radical revision of Pope Alexander’s family tree. Borgia genealogy has always been a challenge, and a playground for mischief-makers. Gaps in the surviving records (to be expected in the provincial Spain of more than five centuries ago), the repeated use of the same given names generation after generation, the adoption of the Borgia patronym by the descendants of at least one of Alexander’s sisters, and the speculations and intended and unintended distortions of generations of writers combine to make it impossible to know whose children even some fairly prominent Borgias were and how they are related to one another. The author knows of no other researcher who has gone nearly as deeply into these mysteries as Peter De Roo or has uncovered nearly as much original material. His evidence, and the arguments based on that evidence, are not in every case as complete or conclusive as one would wish; this is for example true with respect to exactly where and when the members of Cesare and Lucrezia’s generation were born. In the end it becomes necessary, therefore, to consider the case of the Borgias not quite closed. Nevertheless, and in the absence of any real evidence at all for many key aspects of the accepted Borgia myth, the content ofMaterial provides a substantial basis upon which to assert that the following points are probably, and in some cases certainly, true.
1) The four young Borgias who came to prominence in Rome with Cardinal Rodrigo’s election as pope—Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia, and Jofrè—were what genealogists called “siblings german.” That is, all four had the same father and mother; their parents also had at least three other, older children. The eldest was the aforementioned Pedro Luis Lanzol y de Borja, who inherited considerable wealth upon his father’s early death, became the first duke of Gandía, and died years before Rodrigo was elected pope. After him came two daughters named Isabella and Girolama or Geronima. Which means that the threshold for proving all seven to have been Alexander’s children is not as high as one might expect. If he can be shown to have fathered just one, he must have been the father of all.
2) At least five of the children in question, and probably all seven, were born in Spain (see item 3 for additional matter related to this question). Though this is one of the areas in which more documentation is needed, about Pedro Luis there can be no doubt: he is not known ever to have been outside Spain. Nor is there any record of Cesare being in Italy before 1488, when his name appears in the dedication of a book titled Syllabeca by one Paolo Pompilio. At the end of the Italian part of his career, in an exchange with the viceroy of Naples, he stated explicitly that he was Spanish by birth and his siblings were also. As for Juan (or Giovanni the second duke of Gandía), even the historian Gregorovius, who somehow never doubted Alexander’s paternity, says that he was born in Spain, and the Vatican master of ceremonies, Johann Burchard, goes further and describes him as a native of Valencia. About the youngest two, Lucrezia and Jofrè, there is no comparably credible information. Though Lucrezia is often said to have been born in Spoleto in Italy, the supporting documentation has (some might say conveniently) disappeared. Gregorovius, interestingly, says he found her date of birth (April 18, 1480) in a Valencian document. But as we have seen, the young Rodrigo Borgia left Spain for Rome no later than 1455 (at least five years before Pedro Luis’s birth) and returned only once, on the diplomatic mission that kept him there from June 1472 to September 1473. Thus he was too late to have impregnated the mother of Isabella and Girolama, and too soon to be responsible for Cesare or Juan. Which means that Rodrigo Borgia cannot be the father of the seven young Borgias—unless, of course, their mother was shuttling back and forth between Spain and Italy with a frequency all but inconceivable in the fifteenth century.
3) The father of the seven, Cardinal Rodrigo’s nephew Guillen Ramón Lanzol y de Borja, was the firstborn of the numerous children of Rodrigo’s eldest sister Juana de Borja and her husband Pedro Guillen Lanzol, of noble rank as lord of Villalona in Valencia, a wealthy landowner and figure of some distinction (serving as, among other things, Pope Pius II’s envoy to the kings of Aragon and Castile). Guillen Ramón does not appear in the most commonly used Borgia genealogies, but De Roo claimed to have found him in Jacob Wilhelm Imhof’s exhaustive Genealogie XX illustrium familiarum in Hispania of 1712. The author of the present work was able to confirm this claim by inspecting Imhof’s great sprawling volume in the rare books archive of Oxford University’s All Souls College. Guillen Ramón’s wife was, according to De Roo, named Violanta—diminutive Vanotia or Vannozza. He describes her as the daughter of Gerard lord of Castelvert and his wife Damiata del Milà, daughter of Alonso Borgia’s sister Catalina and her husband Juan del Milà. Which means that, although Alexander VI was not the father of the young Borgias, he had a double connection to them by blood. As the grandchildren of his sister Juana, they were his grand-nephews and -nieces. As the great-grandchildren of his aunt Catalina, they were also his first cousins twice removed.
4) When Guillen Ramón Lanzol died, in or very shortly before 1481, Vannozza was pregnant with their last child, Jofrè. Pedro Luis, as eldest son and heir, remained in Spain, where he was achieving precocious success as a courtier and soldier. By the end of that decade, at some date or dates uncertain, separately or together, Vannozza and the younger children made their way to Rome and came under the patronage of Cardinal Rodrigo. This was a reprise of what had happened thirty years before, when Rodrigo and his brother Pedro Luis and their cousin Luis Juan del Milà had been brought to Rome by their Borgia uncle. Vannozza never lived in Cardinal Rodrigo’s palace or the Vatican but before, during, and after Alexander VI’s reign maintained her own establishment.
5) Various documents supposedly establishing Rodrigo’s paternity are, to put it gently, suspect. A typical example is a supposed papal bull bearing the date October 1, 1480, by which Pope Sixtus IV legitimatizes a child whose name is given both as Cesare de Boria and Cesare de Borja and who is described as the son of a cardinal and a married woman, neither of them identified by name. The use of the Spanish form of the family name rather than the Italian Borgia, along with other usages standard in Spanish but not in Vatican documents, brings the bull’s authenticity into question. More damningly, no record of any such bull is to be found in the Curial registry in Rome, into which copies of all official documents were entered before being dispatched. De Roo notes that Cesare would have been about five years old in October 1480 and that as a second son he was in line to inherit nothing and stood in no need of being legitimatized even if a bastard. It is also worth noting that it was established Vatican practice, in documents granting benefices to a person previously legitimatized, to include brief mention of that fact. There exist a number of documents in which Popes Paul II, Sixtus IV, and Innocent VIII granted offices and revenues to the boy Cesare, and in none of them is there any such mention.
De Roo devotes eighty-three pages of his first volume to a close examination of this document and others of its kind, finding in them so many anomalies (incorrect facts, deviations from standard practice, absence of corroboration in the appropriate registers) as to make it seem probable that they are what he calls them: the “fabrication of some criminal ignorant of the habits of the Roman Curia.” He notes, correctly, that the forging of papal documents was widespread for many centuries and was not always so clumsily done.
6) Nothing should be deduced, though much often has been, from those many instances in which Alexander VI refers to Vannozza’s children as sons or daughters—when, for example, he opens a letter to Lucrezia by saluting her as “our beloved daughter.” He addressed Queen Isabella of Spain in exactly the same way, and her husband Ferdinand along with Emperor Maximilian as “beloved son,” while Louis XII was his “most beloved son.” He addressed almost everyone with whom he had correspondence in the same terms, which were standard usage in the personal and official communications of popes (or papas), and was himself repeatedly referred to as a “beloved son” in documents of the popes he served. The fact that he commonly refers to Lucrezia as “our daughter in Christ” seems little less than an acknowledgment that he is expressing himself figuratively and expects to be understood accordingly. Similarly, when in the 1480s he provided Lucrezia’s elder sister Girolama with a dowry of four thousand ducats, the instrument of conveyance described the girl as “the issue of his family and house” and himself as acting as the representative of her brothers “for the honor of this house.” The instances in which the young Borgias are referred to as sons and daughters are vastly outnumbered by those in which Alexander’s friends and enemies as well as neutral observers write of them as the pontiff’s nephews and nieces. Typical are a 1493 ambassador’s letter to the marchioness of Mantua in which Cesare is called nepote de uno fratello di N. Signore(nephew of a brother of Our Lord), a letter of 1494 in which the duke of Ferrara’s agent in Rome writes of Jofrè Borgia as a “nephew son” of the pope, two letters in which the bishop of Modena calls Lucrezia Alexander’s “niece,” a document in which Ferrante of Naples calls his granddaughter Sancia illegitimi but says nothing of the kind about her intended husband Jofrè, and an October 1500 Venetian proclamation that admitted Cesare to the republic’s nobility and described him as nepote di papa Alessandro VI. Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, an Italian-born historian of Spain, wrote that Cesare was rumored to be Alexander’s son—such gossip would have been inevitable—but always denied it. In 1573, long after there could have been any reason for concealment, a grandson of Cesare’s referred to Pope Alexander as Cesare’s oncle in a lawsuit seeking restoration of property confiscated by the French crown.
The above could be expanded into a book of its own and probably should be, but even in severely abbreviated form it demonstrates the legitimacy—the necessity—of questioning what is taken for granted about how Alexander VI was related to Cesare and his siblings. A few other points seem so compelling that not to mention them in this context would be almost irresponsible:
Of fifteenth-century writers whose work has survived, only the credulous and notoriously unreliable scandalmonger Stefano Infessura, keeper of a famous diary and implacable enemy not only of popes but of the institution of the papacy, so much as suggestedduring Alexander’s lifetime that he had an intimate relationship with the lady Vannozza—who, by the way, is not known ever to have set foot inside the Vatican. Not even the supporters of Charles VIII’s invasion of 1494, not even the bitterly vengeful Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, not even Savonarola at his most unrestrained, ever accused Alexander of sexual immorality.
It is not true that Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, either to aggrandize an eldest son or for any other reason, bought the dukedom of Gandía for Pedro Luis Borgia. As the eldest son of Guillen Ramón Lanzol y de Borja, Pedro Luis at the time of his father’s death inherited great wealth including the Gandía properties that later became the nucleus of his duchy. Far from being financially dependent on his kinsman Rodrigo, Pedro Luis actually lent the cardinal a substantial sum in 1483.
A Spanish royal brief of the early 1480s, one confirming the noble status of the boy Juan de Borja (later Giovanni Borgia), refers to his “father the late illustrious [name deleted].” This wording is more laden with significance than is at first apparent. It not only states explicitly that Juan’s father (and Cesare’s and Lucrezia’s et cetera) is deceased (quondam), which Rodrigo Borgia was many years from being when the brief was issued, but also sheds light on who his father was and was not. The word “illustrious” indicates that the father had been noble and a layman; had he been a cardinal, the appropriate modifier would have been “most reverend.” The deletion of the name—a sad fact for scholars—suggests tampering for purposes of concealment, possibly for the same reason that papal bulls may have been forged.
Orestes Ferrara, in a biography of Alexander VI that first appeared in English in 1942, offers a persuasive hypothesis as to why so many writers have been misled into believing that Alexander VI’s true family name was not Borgia but Lanzol. As noted in the foregoing pages, the future Alexander VI was Rodrigo de Borja y de Borja from birth, both of his parents having the same surname. The sons of his sister Juana and her husband Pedro Guillen Lanzol, on the other hand, began life under the name Lanzol y de Borja, and it was their children and grandchildren (including Cesare and his siblings) who introduced that name to Rome before allowing the less prestigious (and utterly unknown in Rome) Lanzol to fall away. They were so numerous, and several became so prominent, that it may have come to be assumed, in Rome, that all Borgias were actually Lanzols.
Questions abound, and at this late date many of them must be considered unanswerable. Be that as it may, so many things weigh against Rodrigo/Alexander’s being the father of Vannozza’s children that it becomes inexcusable to treat his paternity as settled fact.
One final question: why have De Roo’s volumes, which probe the character, career, and family connections of Alexander VI in far greater depth than any other works before or since, had so little impact in the nine decades since their publication? Have later biographers examined them only to conclude that they are not only wrong but unworthy of rebuttal, even of acknowledgment? Or has he simply been ignored?
Something suggestive of an answer lay untouched, deep in the recesses of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, until 2010. That was the year in which the author of the present work first requested access to the Bodleian’s single copy of Material. And began at the beginning, with volume one, the six hundred pages dealing with the Borgia family tree and little else. And found that the pages were uncut—meaning that no one could possibly have ever read them. Other copies exist, of course. The one held by the British Library in London, when examined by the author of the present work, proved to be literally in tatters, the binding having dried and disintegrated, clumps of loose pages held together with strips of knotted ribbon. Is their condition the result of heavy use by researchers over the generations? Or does it indicate so little demand that no one has seen a need to have them rebound? The total absence of detailed attention to De Roo in any work since Material itself was published makes the second possibility seem the more plausible of the two.