14
Charles VIII’s withdrawal to France did not bring peace to Italy. It did not even mark the end of the French invasion. The thousands of troops that the king left behind were a violation of Neapolitan sovereignty and a threat to Il Regno’s neighbors.
The Italians in attendance at Charles’s court, meanwhile, reported that he was making no secret of his intention to invade again in the not very distant future. He was even said to be talking openly, now that he was no longer exposed to the force of Alexander VI’s personality, of placing Cardinal della Rovere on the papal throne.
Though the Holy League had not disintegrated in the aftermath of Ludovico il Moro’s defection, Charles’s return to France had deprived it of its reason for existing; few of the Italian powers saw further need for cooperation. Ferrandino of Naples was an exception. With the French holding a number of his strongholds, and the weakness of his once-great kingdom having been revealed to the world, he was in desperate need of friends. Only Venice was both able and willing to help, however, and it did so only after Ferrandino ceded it the seaports of Brindisi, Trani, Gallipoli, and Otranto. Alexander VI was another exception. In all of Italy he was the sole champion of unity and of unqualified opposition to incursions by outside powers. He like Ferrandino looked first to Venice for support, and he too found the Venetians focused on their own affairs. When he looked to Florence, he saw cause for alarm. Savonarola and the city’s republican government remained openly loyal to France, an inducement to Charles to return. Finding a way to sever that connection became one of the fundamentals of papal policy.
Despite all the turmoil and uncertainty, Alexander had reason to feel confident. He had won much respect, both in Rome and elsewhere, for the adroitness and persistence of his opposition to Charles VIII. And he was far from isolated; Milan and Venice were with him in supporting Pisa’s rejection of Florentine domination. What mattered more, he still had the friendship of Spain—could count on it more surely than ever, because of his refusal to submit to the French king even when at his mercy. This friendship was a sword with more than one edge, however. On the positive side it had become a source of security, because Ferdinand and Isabella were still building up their forces in Sicily and making it known that they would never accept French control of Naples—or for that matter of Rome. Less comfortingly, the growing power of the Spaniards in Italy created the possibility that they might decide to use that power in a campaign of conquest of their own. Ferdinand was ambitious and crafty, and he had never concealed his conviction that Naples was rightfully his.
Against this background, Alexander must have been less than enthusiastic when he learned that Spanish troops were being moved in substantial numbers to the Neapolitan mainland, and that they had been put under the command of one of the most fearsome generals of the age, Gonzalo Hernández de Córdoba, known as Gonsalvo and destined to be immortalized as the Great Captain. He was a veteran of the long, bitter campaign that had ended in 1492 with the expulsion of the Muslims from Granada, and he was formidably smart and tough. As an ally of Ferrandino he was certain to be invaluable. But if ever used to plant the banners of Aragon and Castile in Italy, he would become at least as big a problem as the French. He, and his master and mistress in Spain, needed careful management. Alexander alone was attempting to manage them constructively, in such a way as to maintain the autonomy and integrity of the peninsula.
It is remarkable, in light of his later conduct, how little attention Alexander gave, throughout the invasion crisis and its immediate aftermath, to the fortunes of his young relatives. That whole agenda appears to have been set aside. With the crisis behind him, however, he was freed to turn his attention to other matters, and the matters that interested him most were those young relatives and conditions in the Papal States. One thing in particular rankled, and it was an issue with deep roots: the power, and the troublesome behavior, of the Orsini. Though the Colonna had accepted employment with Gonsalvo and Ferrandino after being discharged by the retreating Charles VIII, and though they had been reconciled with Rome as a result, the old warhorse Virginio Orsini followed an insultingly different course. First he declined an offer to take command of the Holy League’s armies, possibly because accepting would have put him on the same side as the Colonna, more likely because he received a better offer from the count of Montpensier, the hard-pressed viceroy whom King Charles had left behind in Naples. Returning to Il Regno at the head of a force drawn from several branches of his family, Virginio settled in for what he undoubtedly hoped would be a long and lucrative conflict of the traditional Italian kind.
What made all this intolerable from Alexander’s perspective was that Virginio, as lord of the great lakeside stronghold of Bracciano north of Rome, was a papal vassal and therefore—supposedly—subject to Rome. His flouting of his feudal obligations, if no more than typical of the high-handed manner in which the Roman barons had been dealing with their supposed overlords for centuries, served as a galling reminder of the disorder in the Papal States and even in the streets of Rome. Wherever the clans dominated there was thuggery instead of law, the caprices of autocrats rather than anything deserving to be called proper government. And Virginio was the whole problem personified.
The papal army had deteriorated during the reign of Innocent VIII, and almost from the week of his election Alexander had begun spending to rebuild it. Later, drawing on the lessons of the invasion, he began investing in artillery. Thus he was prepared to take action when, early in 1496, he thought he saw an opportunity to break the Orsini once and for all. Undoubtedly he intended more than this; his ultimate objective could only have been to subdue all the baronial clans. But it would have been folly to take on all of them at once, and Virginio’s high-handed insolence made the Orsini the right place to start. Nor was this pope willing to follow the practice of his predecessors and use one local clan to subdue another; instead he summoned Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, son and successor of the great Duke Federico of Urbino, to take command of the papal troops. Guidobaldo was a safe choice: the domains he had inherited from his father were far away and separated from Rome by the Apennines, so distant that the thought of augmenting them with the lands of the Orsini could only have seemed absurd.
At the same time Alexander sent word to Juan de Borja, the young duke of Gandía, urging him to hasten back to Italy from Spain, become Giovanni Borgia once again, and accept appointment as the Vatican’s captain-general. Alexander saw a double-barreled opportunity: a chance to neutralize the Orsini and raise the status of his own family at a single stroke. By merging the two objectives he put his reign on a momentously new course.
Juan, whose late brother Pedro Luis had become the first duke of Gandía partly on the basis of his achievements as a soldier (his inherited wealth had also been a factor, along with Ferdinand and Isabella’s wish to bring him into the royal family by marrying him to their cousin), had no real military credentials of his own. Nevertheless the pope placed him rather than Montefeltro at the head of the campaign against the Orsini, and he can have had no other reason for doing so than the simple fact that Juan was a Borgia. Somebody loyal would be needed to manage the Orsini properties once they had been reclaimed, and Alexander decided to give that job to Juan as well. Who else, in the circus of Italian dynastic politics, could he possibly trust? Even within the family, who but Juan? Jofrè, even if he had been a stronger character, was too young to be a possibility. All the other male Borgias of note, Cesare included, were churchmen. The pope appears to have taken it for granted that the young duke had somehow grown up while in Spain or that, if he remained capable of atrociously immature behavior, that was somehow not going to matter.
We see here the first clear manifestation of Alexander’s defining weakness as a man and as pontiff: his growing and soon all-but-unrestrained willingness to subordinate everything else to his favorites. No doubt he remembered how Calixtus III had turned to him and his brother under similar circumstances and had increased his effectiveness as pope by doing so. If the increasing extremes to which he carried his nepotism might to any extent be rationally explained, the explanation must surely have to do with the perception that Juan and his siblings, if empowered, could become Alexander’s most effective tools in the pursuit of his policy objectives.
The war on the Orsini began in the south, before Juan’s arrival in Italy, and at the start it was impressively successful. This was thanks to the participation of Gonsalvo the Great Captain, who from his new base at Naples set out in pursuit of Virginio and the viceroy Montpensier. With characteristic energy he drove them from one redoubt to another until, by the end of June, he had them bottled up in the town of Atella in the southern province of Basilicata. After a month under siege Montpensier offered a deal: he would surrender if a relief force did not come to his rescue by the time another month had passed, with the understanding that he and his men would then be allowed to return to France. Meanwhile hostilities could cease. Gonsalvo, having provided an early demonstration of his ability to outthink, outmaneuver, and outfight the French as well as Virginio’s Italians, confident of his ability to deal with a relief force in the unlikely event that one appeared, was happy to agree. He was wise to do so: Montpensier, his troops ravaged by disease and desperately short of water, gave up halfway through the period of truce. Though Montpensier was set free as agreed (only to die shortly afterward), Pope Alexander sent an urgent appeal to Ferrandino not to let Virginio go. The king did as asked. Virginio, his son Gian Giordano, and a number of their kinsmen were held as prisoners.
In Rome, meanwhile, a separate northern campaign was still being prepared. When Juan landed at Civitavecchia on the coast, he was escorted in state to Rome, where after a formal reception his brother Cardinal Cesare showed him to the apartments that had been prepared for him in the papal palace. Almost three more months passed before all was deemed to be in readiness. During those months Juan appears to have made himself generally despised, not least by his new comrades in arms. One of them would remember him as “a very mean young man, full of false ideas of grandeur and bad thoughts, haughty, cruel and unreasonable.” Virginio Orsini remained a prisoner in Naples, but his brother-in-law Bartolomeo d’Alviano managed to escape. He made his way northward to Virginio’s main stronghold of Bracciano, where he organized a defense against the assault that everyone knew to be impending.
One wonders if Pope Alexander, usually so circumspect, gave any thought to the risks he was running in entrusting his campaign to the two young dukes—neither of them yet twenty-five, Juan barely twenty—who knelt before him on October 26 to receive his blessing and with it the command of the papal army. Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, heir to one of the greatest military names in Italy, was intelligent, refined, and civilized—an almost perfect Renaissance prince. He had limited experience of warfare, however, and time would show him to have few of his late father’s gifts. Only the belief that blood will out, that the apple never falls far from the tree, can explain his selection as second in command of the expedition that was about to begin. Juan himself, the newly anointed captain-general, had less experience than Guidobaldo and even less to recommend him. When he rode out of Rome that day at the head of his army, the banners of Church and pope unfurled above his head, he was utterly unprepared for what lay ahead.
The question has to be asked: is it credible that Pope Alexander would have taken such a risk for, bestowed so much favor on, not a son but a nephew only? Yes is the only possible answer—an unqualified yes. And the evidence is as simple as it is undeniable: the fact that so many of Alexander’s predecessors had done exactly the same thing. Sometimes the risk paid off handsomely; this was nowhere as true as in the case of Calixtus III and young Rodrigo Borgia. More often the results were catastrophic; for an example it is necessary to look no further back than to one of the popes Rodrigo served—to Sixtus IV and his nephew Girolamo.
As for why, we have already considered how difficult it could be for a pope to find trustworthy agents, and how his own early life had been an object lesson in the potential value of papal nephews in consolidating the Vatican’s power and extending its reach. Beyond that, it is possible to suspect that even a man as robust as Alexander VI, without wife or children and perhaps susceptible to loneliness as old age descends upon him, might respond gratefully to the presence of four attractive and attentive young relatives at his court and in his life.
In the early going, the two young dukes did well. In short order ten Orsini castles were taken, and the papal army continued to advance. As the end of the year approached, only three strongholds, all of them in the heart of Orsini country at Lake Bracciano, remained to be taken. Isola then fell, followed by Trevignano, so that only the majestically high-towered Bracciano Castle remained in Orsini hands. Virginio’s father Napoleone had strengthened and modernized this fortress in the 1480s, adapting it to withstand artillery. Now its defense was in the capable hands of Virginio’s sister Bartolomea d’Alviano and her husband Bartolomeo, an experienced soldier recently escaped from imprisonment in Naples and now acting as the family’s de facto military chief. Their ability to hold out was in doubt, however, until in the depths of winter help suddenly arrived in the form of troops led by Virginio’s illegitimate son Carlo, his cousin Giulio Orsini, and their henchman Vitellozzo Vitelli, tyrant lord of Città di Castello. The three had been in Provence in the service of Charles VIII when word reached them of the pope’s offensive, and the king had given them money with which to ride to the rescue. Giuliano della Rovere had come with them, desperate to make certain that the pope’s campaign failed.
Guidobaldo da Montefeltro was away from Bracciano at this time, recuperating from an injury. At the approach of the relief force, Juan Borgia broke off the siege—probably a sensible move—and removed his artillery to safety behind the walls of the town of Anguillara. When Guidobaldo rejoined him, they set out in search of the enemy, coming upon them near Soriano on January 24, 1497. D’Alviano and his Orsini kin, as it happened, were spoiling for a fight, knowing as they did that Virginio had died in Naples nine days before. Perhaps they had already heard the rumor—it is not impossible that they started the rumor—that Alexander had ordered him poisoned.
The battle that ensued, though hard-fought on both sides, cost the pope’s young dukes everything they had gained over the preceding months and brought their campaign to an ignominious end. Guidobaldo was taken prisoner, Juan Borgia ran for Rome after suffering a slight wound, and their army was scattered. The cause of the disaster was a blunder by the usually competent Fabrizio Colonna, who by advancing too aggressively had left his flank exposed to the savagely aggressive Vitellozzo Vitelli. The result was humiliation for Guidobaldo, who found himself being held for ransom; for Juan, who became a laughingstock because of his flight; and above all for the pope. For the victors, who found themselves back in control of the countryside north of Rome, it was bittersweet revenge.
Alexander reacted by doing what he would have been wise to do in the first place: he sent an appeal to Naples for Gonsalvo to come north and take command. Other developments, however, soon made a resumption of the offensive impossible. On January 17 the latest conflict between France and Spain was suspended by a truce, and in order not to jeopardize it, Ferdinand began pressing Rome to stop making war on King Charles’s Orsini minions. Venice meanwhile wanted to avoid French involvement in a dispute it was having with Naples over certain Adriatic ports—a dispute in which Alexander was siding with Ferrandino, urging him to stand firm—and so it too applied what pressure it could to get the pope to desist. Even the Orsini were eager for an end to hostilities, being satisfied with the fruits of their victory at Soriano and having had a taste of what the Spanish were capable of when under Gonsalvo’s command. Alexander yielded, if regretfully. He accepted from the Orsini an indemnity of fifty thousand gold ducats along with their promise to refrain from offensive action. In return he released the Orsini still held prisoner in Naples—the deceased Virginio’s vengeful son Gian Giordano among them. He handed over the properties the Orsini had earlier lost to Guidobaldo and Juan. On balance, the Orsini had survived Alexander’s offensive with their strength undiminished and their freedom of action unimpaired.
Gonsalvo arrived in Rome four days after the signing of the settlement. Rather than allowing his long journey to go for naught and his talents to go unused, Alexander dispatched him and Juan as co-commanders to the port of Ostia, which was now one of France’s few outposts south of Genoa and the last bit of Italy still professing loyalty to Giuliano della Rovere. Its capture came within a couple of weeks and was important. It restored the River Tiber to Rome’s control, so that for the first time in two years food and other necessities could be imported by ship and barge. Alexander took personal possession of Ostia amid great celebration, using the occasion to declare all of Cardinal della Rovere’s benefices forfeit and to remove his brother as prefect of Rome. The cardinal himself was now in permanent exile, serving as archbishop of Avignon under the protection of the French crown, biding his time and dreaming of revenge.
The only difficulties of the Ostia campaign involved Juan Borgia and rose out of the abrasiveness of his personality. He clashed almost violently with Gonsalvo, who was more than twice his age and an immeasurably more capable and respected soldier. Gonsalvo developed such hearty contempt for his young co-commander that later, during Easter observances in Rome, he refused to accept a palm from the pope’s hands because this modest honor had been conferred on Juan first. Lucrezia Borgia’s husband, Giovanni Sforza, also was at Ostia, having finally and with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm consented to leave his palace at Pesaro and contribute his troops to the pope’s wars. He too was seen to have a heated dispute with the duke of Gandía, the cause of which is not known. The duke had a talent for giving offense and did more than all his siblings to make the people of Rome hate the Spaniards among them. If Alexander had any awareness of this, there is no evidence that he cared.
The recovery of Ostia coincided with the signing of a truce between the Holy League—which at this point meant, in practical terms, Venice and Rome only—and France. Military operations thus came to an end at last, and Italy entered upon a half-year of general tranquillity. Once again Alexander was free to turn his attention where he wished, and he began to make his family his first priority to such an extent that in time he would appear to be almost in the grip of an obsession. He did so first—it seems fitting almost to the point of inevitability—in connection with the crown of Naples.
It happened that Ferrandino, only twenty-seven years old, had unexpectedly died some months before. This energetic and courageous young monarch, recently wed to an aunt with whom he was passionately in love (she was a daughter of his grandfather Ferrante but several years younger than her nephew-husband nonetheless), probably fell victim to malaria. His passing is easily seen as a tragedy for the House of Aragon, as by all accounts he was free of the most appalling traits of his father and grandfather. In fact, however, the uncle who succeeded him, Alfonso II’s younger brother Federico or Don Fadrique, was at least as impressive and less alarmingly impulsive. The third new king of Naples in just three years, Fadrique was in firm control of his throne, thanks largely to the presence of Gonsalvo’s Spanish troops. But he needed to be crowned, this could only be done by his liege lord the pope or someone deputized by the pope, and his coronation was now conspicuously overdue. No one was surprised, therefore, when Alexanderannounced in consistory that the time had come for one of the cardinals to go to Naples and conduct the necessary formalities.
Eyebrows went up, however, when the pope announced his choice: Cardinal Cesare. Twenty-two years old at most, three years a cardinal, Cesare was known for nothing except the dashing figure he cut in his pursuit of pleasure and such boyish exploits as his escape from Charles VIII. The conferring of such a prestigious assignment on a youth who made no pretense at taking his clerical status seriously was almost a provocation. It was resented by his older colleagues, the ambitious as well as the distinguished, those sensitive to the proprieties as well as those thinking mostly of the rich gifts a ruler of Naples could be expected to bestow upon whoever anointed him as king.
A bigger shock followed just days later, when the cardinals were again called together and informed of the pope’s newest plans for Juan duke of Gandía. Still only six months from his flight from the battlefield at Soriano, Juan was to be invested with the duchy of Benevento, an ancient papal fief only some fifty miles north of Naples and, with its great palace and fortifications, an anchor of papal strength in the south. He was also made lord of the cities of Terracina and Pontecorvo, and all these places were to be inheritable in perpetuity by his legitimate male descendants. The kingdom of Naples had historical claims to these places and disputed the pope’s right to bestow them on anyone, but Alexander’s timing was impeccable: Don Fadrique’s need for papal investiture was certain to deter him from objecting strongly. Only one cardinal, Pope Pius II’s nephew Francesco Piccolomini, spoke openly in opposition to Alexander’s alienation of so much papal territory for the benefit not only of an undistinguished lay member of the Borgia family but of Borgias yet unborn. Gandía being a nephew-by-marriage of Spain’s ruling monarchs, the Sacred College’s Spanish contingent (to which Alexander had added seven members in the five years since his election) were untroubled to see him treated so generously. Though the Italian cardinals were inured to nepotism, the acquiescence of almost all of them makes it impossible not to wonder if Alexander had used bullying tactics to assure their silence.
As for Juan, there is no sure way of deciding how much credence to give to the many contemptuous descriptions that have come down to us in the chronicles of the time. The number and unanimity of these descriptions make it necessary to accept them as accurate reflections, to some considerable extent, of his character and conduct. Without question he was a pleasure-loving young libertine, capable of displaying the Borgia charm but also of making himself insufferable. The clashes with Gonsalvo and with Giovanni Sforza that we noted earlier were far from unique; a dispute with Cardinal Ascanio Sforza flew so completely out of control that before it ended, their retainers were killing one another in the streets. If it is unnecessary to dismiss the duke as irredeemably vicious, in the face of the available evidence it is pointless even to wonder if he might be an innocent victim of partisan slander. Possibly he had been spoiled as a child; fatherless, he inherited his brother’s dukedom unexpectedly and at an early age and from that point forward was immensely rich, immensely privileged, and perhaps excessively indulged. His story may be, at least in part, the familiar one of too much too soon.
The many powerful enemies that Juan had made in the year since his return from Spain, and his ability to remain the pope’s favorite in spite of his too-obvious faults, provide the background for one of the most intriguing murder mysteries in all of history. On the evening of June 14, 1497, at a vineyard in Rome, Vannozza Borgia held a going-away party for her son Cesare, who was to depart for his great assignment in Naples within a few days. Juan was among those in attendance, and he was accompanied by a figure in whose company he had been seen repeatedly in recent weeks, a man whose face was concealed behind a mask and whose identity appears to have been unknown to the other party-goers. (Going about masked was somehow not as bizarre a practice in the Italy of the Renaissance as it seems today; it would become almost standard practice for Cesare, especially after his good looks were marred by syphilis.) Late in the evening, as everyone was going home, Juan rode off into the dark streets with his masked companion, the two of them mounted on the same mule with a manservant walking beside. When the three came to a square, Juan told the servant to wait there one hour, and then to go home if his master had not returned. The duke and the masked man then went on their way, the latter to remain a mystery forever, the former never to be seen alive again.
The next morning, when it was discovered that Juan had not returned to the papal palace, no one was concerned. He was notorious for his nocturnal, mainly amorous adventures, and as the day advanced and he failed to appear, it was assumed that, as had happened before, he was holed up in the room of some paramour, unwilling for the sake of her reputation or perhaps his own to emerge before dark. When night fell and he had still not returned, Alexander became worried. Search parties were sent out. They found the duke’s mule, its trappings disarranged. They also found the manservant, gravely wounded but unable to provide any helpful information. At last someone turned up a clue: the statement of a Slovenian watchman to the effect that, in the middle of the night, he had seen five men dump a body into the Tiber and weigh it down with rocks when it floated to the surface. Asked why he had not reported this, he replied that in the course of many nights standing guard over cargo barges he had seen any number of corpses deposited in the river, and that until now no one had ever seemed to care.
Fishermen were deployed to drag the river bottom. One of them hooked the dead body of the duke and pulled it out of the mud. It bore nine deep stab wounds, it was still dressed in the costly garments that Juan had worn to his mother’s party, and one of its pockets contained a purse fat with gold. The impossibility of believing that Juan had been killed by robbers added urgency to the question of who had done the deed, and why. As in all the best mysteries, there was an excess of plausible suspects. Ascanio Sforza for one: his recent dispute with Juan had already had fatal consequences. Lucrezia’s husband for another: like his cousin Ascanio, Giovanni Sforza had clashed recently and almost violently with Juan, and Ludovico il Moro’s reconciliation with Charles of France had made Giovanni’s position in Rome so excruciatingly awkward that he believed his life to be in danger. On Good Friday he had fled Rome, first returning to his home base at Pesaro and later proceeding to Milan, where he asked but did not receive help from his cousins Ludovico il Moro and Cardinal Ascanio. The brothers were unwilling to offend Alexander and pressed Giovanni to obey the pope’s order to return to Rome. By then, however, there was no point in returning. Lucrezia had gone into seclusion at the San Sisto convent outside Rome, and Alexander had declared his intention to have her marriage annulled. Though neither Ascanio nor Giovanni was in Rome at the time of Juan’s disappearance, both certainly had the means to arrange his murder.
Also to be considered was young Guidobaldo duke of Urbino, a gentle, scholarly soul but burning with resentment at being blamed for the defeat at Soriano and left to pay his own ransom in order to win his release. Plus the men of all the families, some of them noble, whose wives and daughters Juan had seduced or targeted for seduction. That line of inquiry brought even the youngest of the Borgia brothers, Jofrè prince of Squillace, into the circle of suspects. He was living in Rome once again, and his wife Sancia was among Juan’s numberless paramours (and Cesare’s). Finally, most worthy of suspicion of all, were the Orsini. It was Juan who had been sent to destroy them, Juan who was to have been given their lands when his mission was accomplished, and Juan who could be expected to take up arms against them once again whenever Alexander felt ready to make another try. Rome was thick with Orsini who were capable of committing murder.
Alexander was shattered by the discovery of the body. He withdrew into deep seclusion for days, grieving loudly, not eating or drinking or sleeping. When he finally emerged, it was to take control of the search for the killers, though he declared as he did so that he already knew who the culprits were. That he loved the young duke had always been obvious—it is deplorable that we know essentially nothing about the bond that had formed between them, or what exactly about Juan caused the pope to find him so appealing—and the weight of his loss was obvious now. Perhaps too he was tormented by guilt, by the realization that he had given the boy more authority and responsibility than he was capable of handling, thereby exposing him to the wrath of their foes.
Alexander assembled the cardinals and poured out his grief. “The duke of Gandía is dead,” he said. “A greater calamity could not have befallen us, for we bore him unbounded affection. Life has lost its interest for us. Indeed, had we seven papacies we would give them all to recall the duke to life. It must be that God thus punishes us for our sins, for the duke has done nothing to deserve so terrible a fate.” He then went through an abridged list of the obvious suspects—the Sforzas, Jofrè, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro—and said he knew all of them to be innocent.
Of the Orsini he said nothing. No stretch of the imagination is required to suppose that Alexander had satisfied himself of their guilt and had decided to keep silent. He would have been powerless, in that summer of 1497, to bring the Orsini to justice or to exact other forms of revenge. By keeping his own counsel, he could watch and wait.
Alexander ended his investigation sooner than anyone had expected and forbade further inquiries into Juan’s death. In the fullness of time it would be suggested, and repeated in almost everything written about the Borgias, that he did this upon learning that the murderer was in fact Cesare. This is a logical inference—but only if one begins by assuming Cesare’s guilt. For at least a century now virtually every responsible student of the Borgias has found it impossible to assume anything of the kind. Scholars have concluded instead that Cesare was almost certainly not guilty (certainty being impossible in a matter of this kind). They finally noticed, if belatedly, that in the aftermath of his brother’s death Cesare was never so much as mentioned among the possible suspects, even by the gossips, and that when he began to be mentioned and then declared guilty, this was invariably done by propagandists and sensation-seekers. Cesare had actually stood to gain little or nothing from the murder. Juan was survived by a wife, an infant daughter, and a small son who as third duke of Gandía inherited all of his father’s possessions in Italy as well as Spain. Cesare remained exactly what he had been when Juan was alive: a wealthy and restless young cardinal, ridiculously out of place in the vocation in which he found himself.
At that first consistory after the murder, after giving vent to his feelings and doing what he could to clear the Sforzas and others of suspicion, Alexander turned to other matters. He said that during the days and nights when his pain was so intense as to make it impossible to sleep, he had come to a decision. “We are resolved without delay to think of the Church first and foremost,” he declared, “and not of ourselves nor of our privileges.” He announced that he was creating a commission of six cardinals—men who, when their names were disclosed, proved to be among the most respected members of the Sacred College—and assigning it to set to work immediately on developing a program of ecclesiastical reform. He concluded by saying that “we must begin by reforming ourselves,” pledging that he would “submit our own person to the regulations that they [the commissioners] shall make.” Obviously it is possible that these words are an admission that Alexander had not been faithful to his priestly vows, that even since his election he had been guilty of serious immorality. It should not be necessary to note also, however, that they are not necessarily anything of the kind. Such things could be said, and at various times have been said, by good men and women of many faiths, including pontiffs known for their humility and virtuous lives.
Three days after the consistory Cesare departed for Naples and the crowning of Don Fadrique. It has often been suggested that he should not have gone so soon after his brother’s death, with Alexander in such a depressed state. That he should have asked to be replaced and insisted on going because he was eager to put himself beyond the reach of the men investigating the murder. Eager he may or may not have been, but if he was hoping for anything, it was not necessarily to escape scrutiny. He was young and high-spirited, and it is not implausible that what he wanted to get away from was the deep gloom that had descended upon the papal household and court. Naples offered not only a coronation ceremony in which Cesare was slated to play a central role but all the festivities attendant upon such an event. In any case he departed on schedule, and when his assignment was completed, he decided to remain in Naples, a city with much to interest a vigorous young man with a relaxed moral code.
With his departure, none of the young Borgias remained at the papal court. Juan was in his tomb, and in the aftermath of his murder, in the depths of his grief, Alexander had ordered Jofrè to return to his principality of Squillace in Naples and take Sancia with him. He did so possibly for their safety but more likely because he was disgusted with incessant gossip about Sancia’s sexual escapades. Jofrè, all of fifteen years old now and in his third year as a married man, is not likely to have regarded his exile as a punishment or a loss. He and Sancia had spent the first two years of their marriage in Squillace and had grown accustomed there to a life of indolent self-indulgence. Alexander must have realized by now that this was one young Borgia of whom not a great deal was to be expected. The boy’s tolerance of being repeatedly cuckolded, even by his brothers, bespoke softness of character, a willingness, not characteristic of the Borgias, to settle for a passive if privileged existence.
Lucrezia meanwhile was sequestered at the convent of San Sisto just outside Rome, waiting for an ecclesiastical court to declare that she was not married to Giovanni Sforza and never had been. Their union appears never to have had any substance on the personal level; the available evidence, sparse as it is, suggests that Lucrezia found her new life dreary, her spouse uninteresting. When she refused to end a visit to Rome late in 1496 and return to Pesaro as Sforza naturally expected, he grudgingly joined her, remaining until Easter of the following year. But daily contact with the Borgias served only to worsen matters, showing Sforza that his wife’s family had no liking and little use for him, making him increasingly uneasy. It was during his sojourn in Rome that, taking part in the siege of Ostia, he was observed in an angry exchange with Juan Borgia. He was learning too that Cesare, cardinal or not, could be a dangerous acquaintance. He would have heard the story of how, when Charles VIII’s army passed through Rome after withdrawing from Naples, Cesare had led an attack on a company of Swiss mercenaries, seeking revenge for the earlier sacking of his mother Vannozza’s house. This episode, which ended with sixteen of the Swiss dead and the survivors beaten and stripped of every possession, had become part of a growing body of Roman lore about the Borgia brothers and their reckless ways.
Making everything more frightening still was the painfully obvious fact that the circumstances that had led to Lucrezia’s being offered to the Sforzas as a bride no longer obtained. The marriage had seemed important when Alexander and Ferrante of Naples were at odds and Sforza Milan seemed an essential counterweight to Neapolitan power. Now, with not only Ferrante but his heir Alfonso II dead and the pope established as Naples’s best friend among the Italian powers, all that was in the past. Shortly after Easter 1497 Sforza left Rome in disguise and returned to Pesaro alone. On an earlier occasion, when he had returned to Pesaro without Lucrezia, he had done so out of simple pique and weariness with a make-believe marriage to a child. This time, however, he was in flight and fearful of his life. Alexander, no doubt pleased to be rid of him, asked the appropriate legal authorities to declare Lucrezia’s marriage invalid. She disappeared into the San Sisto convent, and by the time of Juan Borgia’s murder the pope and Cesare were already considering where to marry her next.
The murder put all such things in abeyance. In the weeks after Cesare’s departure for Naples, little happened at the Vatican beyond the routine performance of the Curial bureaucracy’s essential functions. The most conspicuous exception was the pope’s newly created reform commission, the members of which began meeting almost daily, filling more and more pages—ultimately more than six hundred—with lists of Church problems and possible remedies. A number of the commission’s recommendations were directed at the Sacred College itself: that even when hosting banquets cardinals should not serve more than two meats, that no cardinal should serve as the representative of a secular prince, that when moving about Rome no cardinal should have an entourage of more than twenty horsemen, that there should never be more than twenty-four cardinals, and that among them should be representatives of all the major nations of Europe. Vatican policy came under scrutiny as well: the commission proposed higher qualifications for protonotaries, new ways of dealing with disagreements over how much autonomy the Church should have in various countries, and harsh punishment for the forging of official documents. This last was a problem of real urgency; the rudimentary technology of the time made forgery all too easy, detection exceedingly difficult. This was made freshly apparent in September, when the archbishop who was Pope Alexander’s private secretary confessed to having produced and sold large numbers of counterfeit dispensations.
Action, however, was going to require the attention of the pope, and Alexander was only beginning to emerge from seclusion. He was not yet himself, which is perhaps why, after long resistance, he yielded wearily to the demand of the College of Cardinals that Savonarola’s excommunication be announced to Florence and the world.
When summer ended Cesare, advised that the pope was no longer in the depths of despair and that life at the papal court was beginning to be tolerable once again, decided to end his holiday in Naples. He was now fully formed, the formidable figure soon to be described by the Venetian diplomat Paolo Capello as “physically most beautiful … tall and well-made.” He took two things back to Rome with him: “the French disease,” syphilis, and a determination to start his life over on an entirely new track.
Background
THE YOUNG ONES
IF THE MOST WIDELY ACCEPTED ESTIMATE OF CESARE BORGIA’S date of birth is correct, he was just reaching his twenty-second birthday when he returned from Naples. He was already, however, a man of obvious and exceptional gifts. Strong, athletic, and restlessly energetic, strikingly good-looking under a mane of dark-reddish hair, he combined the intelligence that had won him distinction as a student of civil and canon law with a winning personality, a steely will, and a degree of self-possession that was quite extraordinary in such a young man.
He was also, as the revenge killing of sixteen Swiss soldiers shows, already capable of utterly ruthless behavior.
The fact that Cesare was a second son explains why his family had set him on the path to a clerical career when he was still a small child. He had a much older brother, Pedro Luis, to pursue success in the lay world and produce heirs. His own assignment was to climb the same ecclesiastical ladder that, two decades before his birth, had taken Alonso Borgia to the papacy and Rodrigo to the vice-chancellorship and brought bounty to the whole family. Inevitably, and for reasons having nothing to do with merit, he was pulled up that ladder at a fabulously (by today’s standards, a ridiculously) rapid pace. When all of seven years old, he was made an apostolic protonotary (a coveted position supposedly requiring advanced knowledge of the law), and shortly thereafter he became canon of the cathedral of Valencia, archdeacon of Játiva, and rector of Gandía. Each of these positions brought with it an income that few Spanish clerics could ever hope to achieve. Together they supported Cesare in the style of a young noble and provided him with an elite education without making even small demands on the family’s resources.
Everything known about Cesare’s eldest brother, Pedro Luis, suggests that he too must have been an impressive young man. Their father died in the early 1480s, possibly while his wife was still pregnant with Jofrè. Pedro Luis, as heir, was taken into the court of Ferdinand and Isabella and became a favorite there, serving while still a boy both as standard-bearer to the king and honorary chamberlain. As a young nobleman in the age of the conquistadores he naturally took up soldiering and was quick to win distinction, becoming the first of Ferdinand’s men to break into the besieged Muslim stronghold of Ronda. Things turned suddenly bad for him in 1484—he must have been in his early twenties—when a dispute over money caused Pope Innocent VIII to excommunicate Ferdinand and Isabella. The royal couple retaliated by confiscating the revenues of all the Spanish benefices held by the vice-chancellor’s family and imprisoning Pedro Luis. It was a petty quarrel and soon patched up, and afterward Pedro Luis was showered with new signs of favor. Ferdinand and Isabella raised him to the status of grandee, conferring the same honor on his younger brothers as they did so. In 1485 they made him duke of Gandía (he having inherited extensive properties in and around the town of Gandía at the time of his father’s death). His career reached its zenith when he was betrothed to Doña Maria Enriquez, a royal cousin and a stupendous marital prize. The girl was too young to be wed, but when she came of age, Pedro Luis was to be taken into a royal family as powerful as any in Europe.
It never happened. Pedro Luis died before it became possible, the place, year, and cause of his death being uncertain. Either not long before or not long after his death his mother Vannozza took the rest of her children—three daughters and three sons—to Rome. The two eldest girls, Isabella and Girolama, were married into the minor Roman nobility, their great-uncle Cardinal Rodrigo serving as their sponsor and helping to provide dowries. Juan, as the eldest surviving son not marked for the Church, inherited not only his brother’s ducal title and estates but his fiancée, the royal cousin Maria Enriquez de Luna. It can be assumed that he also underwent whatever education and training were deemed appropriate to the highest reaches of the nobility. The child Lucrezia had been remembered in Pedro Luis’s will with a bequest of eleven thousand Valencian ducats for her dowry. Cesare, financially independent thanks to his benefices, continued his studies, enrolling at age fourteen in Perugia’s prestigious Sapienza and advancing two years later to the university at Pisa. However impressive his talents and attainments may have been at this early stage, nothing but the influence of Vice-Chancellor Rodrigo can explain his appointment to the bishopric of Pamplona in Navarre in 1491.
Cesare’s precocious advancement was carried to the furthest possible extreme when Rodrigo became pope: he was immediately given the see of Valencia, which Innocent VIII had raised to archiepiscopal status, so that that prestigious benefice had now been held by three consecutive generations of Borgias. When, a year later, he was named to the College of Cardinals, he was not only not a uniquely youthful appointee but not even the youngest of the dozen men given red hats at that time. The one flaw in all this, and in whatever great plans Pope Alexander had for Cesare’s future, was the boy’s glaring unfitness for an ecclesiastical career and his refusal to pretend otherwise. He rarely wore ecclesiastical garb and persisted in a way of life that, though it would have been accepted as natural in any lively and highborn young layman of the time, in a prince of the Church was nothing less than scandalous.
Long afterward, when propagandists for enemies of the Borgias began finding it useful to assume that Cesare had murdered his brother, it came to be taken for granted that he must have seethed with jealousy at having been shunted into the Church while the less able Juan was left free to make war, marry royalty, accumulate noble titles and great estates, and indulge in wild behavior without being pointed to as a disgrace to his vocation. But even if it was at about this same time that Cesare decided to reject the future that had been laid out for him, it does not necessarily follow that he had ever seen his brother as an obstacle to his escape. It definitely does not follow that he decided to take his brother’s life in order to get him out of the way. It does not follow even though we know him to be capable of murder.
As a cardinal Cesare devoted himself mainly to amusements: racing horses, bullfighting, carousing, and pursuing the fair sex. It was hardly to be expected that he would show any interest in the affairs or the needs of the Church—in the work of Alexander’s reform commission least of all. He was drawn to politics, however, and to the winning and using of power. This led him to become deeply involved in the life of his sister Lucrezia. Pope Alexander had already, in spite of his love for Lucrezia, repeatedly used her as an instrument of diplomacy, first betrothing her to two Spanish noblemen when she was still a child, then marrying her to Giovanni Sforza when she was only just barely more than a child. Cesare, in cooperation with his brother Juan while the latter was still alive and then on his own, carried her exploitation a big step further by setting out to undo her marriage. His motives, so far as we can tell, were entirely political and entirely selfish.
This turned into a messy business. What Alexander or Cesare or both wanted—it is unclear who was the strategist in this matter—was a decree of annulment, a ruling that Lucrezia had never been validly married to Sforza and so was free to become someone else’s bride. The pope could have accomplished this by papal bull, simply declaring the marriage to be null, but he rejected this approach as insufficiently credible. He turned instead to the canon lawyers, suggesting that they might find it interesting to consider whether one or both of Lucrezia’s Spanish betrothals might have been sufficiently binding to leave her unfree to marry Sforza.
When the lawyers replied that this was an unpromising way of approaching the question, the Borgias decided to claim instead that the marriage had never been consummated because Sforza was impotent. The beauty of this approach was that it entailed an official confirmation of Lucrezia’s virginity, thereby fully restoring her value on the marriage market. The drawback was that it required Sforza to confess to something that any man would have found humiliating. He reacted in almost hysterical terms, pointing out that his first wife had died in childbirth and complaining that Alexander wanted to end the marriage in order to have Lucrezia for himself.
Thus was born the immortal legend of incest among the Borgias, with Lucrezia at its center. The story would expand over the centuries until Lucrezia was an international institution, a universal symbol of evil, not only a sexual wanton but a serial murderer, a poisoner of the most exquisite skill. In fact she was never anything of the kind. At the time of her final separation from Giovanni Sforza she was nothing more or less than a pretty, normally frivolous girl of about seventeen. She took a natural delight in her life as a princess, her beautiful gowns, and the attentions of the many young gallants who frequented the papal court. She took an equally natural pleasure in sharing center stage at that court with two close friends, her similarly pretty, distinctly less innocent sister-in-law Sancia and the stunningly beautiful Giulia Farnese Orsini, wife of the young lord Orsino Orsini, who was Lucrezia’s somewhat distant cousin by virtue of being the son, as noted earlier, of Adriana del Milà. (See this page for more on the alleged intimate relationship between Pope Alexander and Giulia Farnese and an explanation of why that part of the Borgia legend is omitted from the present narrative.)
Though the years ahead would be heavy with dark events, and though she was quite human enough to be changed by the misfortunes that befell her, Lucrezia would mature and improve rather than harden with the years. If by the end of her life not a great deal would remain of the fun-loving child-bride she had been when first married, neither would she bear the slightest resemblance to the monstrous Lucrezia of legend.
Be all that as it may, when Cesare returned from Naples, he had changed radically. He had awakened to a whole new world of possibilities—above all to the possibility, for himself, of an entirely new life. While idling at Don Fadrique’s court, he had become aware that the king had a grown but unmarried daughter. This princess, Carlotta by name, was a descendant of French royalty on her mother’s side, had been raised in France virtually as a member of the king’s family, and was living there still. It had occurred to him that she was a prize worthy of a prince and that whoever married her would become, by doing so, princely. He decided that he wanted this Carlotta. What he had to do first was get himself out of the Church.