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If anything is certain in the story of the Borgias, it is that the man who became Pope Alexander VI was not weak and not a fool. Raised at an improbably early age to the second-highest position in the international Church, left to shift for himself when his uncle died just two years later, he not only survived but went on to flourish through the reigns of four very different, often very difficult popes. Finally winning election himself in the face of powerful and richly financed rivals, he spent his first five years as pontiff dealing with invasion, betrayal, rebellion, heresy, and murder. He emerged from each crisis, even the spirit-crushing death of his favorite nephew, with his vitality and buoyancy unimpaired and his stature enhanced. At age sixty-five, operating effectively at the highest levels of European power politics, he was putting on weight but otherwise remained the same cheerily easygoing, life-loving bundle of energy he had been at twenty-five.
All of which says more than anything else can about the power of Cesare Borgia’s personality, the force of his will. Because from 1498 onward, from the point where he made up his mind that he was not going to stay in the Church but instead was going to transform himself into a great secular prince, Cesare began reshaping the mind and will of Alexander to conform to his own. Ultimately he would be astonishingly successful at this, appearing at crucial junctures to reduce the pontiff to a mere instrument and in the process putting all Rome at the service of his own ambition. It is necessary to remember just how formidable Alexander himself was in order to get some sense of just how much force the younger man projected.
Almost the last significant crisis of Alexander’s reign in which Cesare and his interests were not significantly involved was the climax of Savonarola’s story. In the aftermath of his confronting of Charles VIII at Poggibonsi in June 1495, even as half the French army withdrew beyond the Alps and the half remaining in Naples was destroyed piecemeal by Gonsalvo’s Spaniards, the friar had tirelessly predicted that in due course the king would return and do a proper job of purging Italy of its corruptions, including and even especially its corrupt pope. In this case as always, Alexander was indifferent to criticism of himself personally—it must be noted that even as his condemnations became almost insanely extreme, the friar never accused the pope of having mistresses or children—but the problems created by Savonarola’s preaching were more political than personal, and they were political in two ways. First, Savonarola’s embrace not only of France but of French ambitions in Italy was alarming to the members of the so-called Holy League, originally formed to force Charles to return home and surviving as an instrument for keeping him there. These members wanted Florence to break with France, join them, and become part of the deterrent to a second French invasion. They began to see Savonarola’s removal as the only possible way of making this happen.
Second, as Savonarola escalated his rhetoric, he was no longer merely calling Rome an evil place and the pope a bad man but denying the Church’s authority and Alexander’s right to the papal crown. He was proclaiming himself to be subject to no institution and to no one except God. This was more than shockingly bold in the Europe of his time. It was a direct challenge to the established order, a renunciation of that order, and easily seen as an invitation to chaos. Alexander found himself under growing pressure to respond. It came from the princes of Italy and the princes of the Church in equal measure.
What is remarkable is the restraint with which Alexander responded to the provocation and the pressure. He began, in July 1495, with a letter that, in unthreatening terms, directed Savonarola to come to Rome and explain his prophecies and preachments. When the friar replied that he was unable to comply because of illness and the mischief that the enemies of Florence might commit in his absence, Alexander allowed matters to rest. In the months following, however, Savonarola not only continued to attack the pope from his pulpit but did so in steadily more extreme terms. In September Alexander wrote again, not to the friar this time but to the Dominican monastery of Santa Croce in Lombardy, informing it of a reorganization in which Savonarola’s San Marco convent among others was now under its jurisdiction and that the “certain Fra Girolamo” who was San Marco’s prior was to be ordered to stop preaching until he visited Rome to explain himself. Savonarola, when he learned of this, sent Alexander a letter that amounted, behind its verbosity and rather fuzzy diction, to a declaration of defiance. For him to submit to the authority of Santa Croce, he said, would be tantamount to “making our adversary our judge.” As for a trip to Rome, that would be pointless because “it is now plain that I have not lapsed into error.”
By the final months of 1495 Savonarola was not only mocking the pope in his sermons but explicitly challenging the right of the ecclesiastical authorities to tell him to do anything. He announced that the vows of obedience that he had taken early in his career no longer applied because as God’s chosen messenger he was now on a higher plane than other clerics. It is of course legitimate to argue that Savonarola was behaving heroically, that his actions echo the earlier, similar courage of Jan Hus of Bohemia and foreshadow the later, more momentous rebellion of Martin Luther (who was, in 1495, an eleven-year-old schoolboy in Germany). Such arguments do not alter the fact that the nature and virulence of his attacks, especially when coupled with the wild enthusiasm of some of his followers, constituted too radical a challenge to be shrugged off indefinitely. Alexander’s forbearance was, under the circumstances, impressive. His attitude becomes all the more remarkable when one considers that states including Venice, Ferrara, and Bologna all regarded the friar’s preachments as an incitement to the French to invade and were demanding that he be shut up.
Nevertheless, when on October 16 Alexander next wrote to Savonarola, he withdrew his earlier subordination of the San Marco monastery to Santa Croce, and though he repeated his order that Savonarola stop preaching until he had visited Rome, he promised to receive him “with a father’s heart.” Savonarola responded with enigmatic silence, neither leaving Florence nor, at least for some weeks, returning to his pulpit. The situation hung in suspense until February 1497, when Florence’s ruling council took fright at reports that Piero de’ Medici was plotting a coup. Knowing that Savonarola’s hatred for the banished Medici was no less intense than his hatred for Rome, the council not merely encouraged but ordered him to resume preaching. He did so with relish, throwing off all inhibition in a round of Lenten sermons that went further than before in denouncing the Church as corrupt. “Oh prostitute Church,” he railed, “thou hast displayed thy foulness to the whole world, and stinkest up to heaven.”
This went on week after week, the Church decried as “lower than a beast, a monster of abomination,” until finally Savonarola was telling his listeners that it was necessary to accept what he was saying in order to be a good Christian. Florence’s council, weary now of the kinds of disturbances that it had earlier encouraged and less fearful of a Medici coup than of letting things get out of hand, used an outbreak of plague as an excuse to order not only Savonarola but all members of religious orders to desist from preaching. After all that had transpired, Savonarola’s response could have surprised no one: he declared that to oppose him was to oppose God. When his words failed to ignite the kind of public excitement to which he had become accustomed, he pulled back, sending a vaguely conciliatory letter to the pope and lapsing once again into silence. People who had earlier responded sympathetically to his demands for reform—people as respected as Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, who was known to have a good opinion of Savonarola and had been appointed vicar-general of the Dominicans of Tuscany as a gesture of goodwill on Alexander’s part—began to turn away in disgust or alarm. From every direction came demands that the pope do something.
Once again, Alexander did nothing. By March 1497 the friar was calling for a council to install a new pope. He was also writing to the kings of France, Spain, England, and Hungary and the Holy Roman emperor, informing them that Alexander had usurped the pontifical throne and that his position was “opposed to charity and the law of God.” Carnival time brought another Bonfire of the Vanities, followed by a series of Lenten sermons, delivered in Florence’s glorious Duomo, that in their extremism surpassed anything that had come before. On May 12, yielding to demands from all sides, Alexander signed a brief of excommunication. It charged Savonarola with having “disseminated pernicious doctrines to the scandal and great grief of simple souls” and forbade all Christians “to assist him, hold intercourse with him, or abet him either by word or deed.” He resisted making it known, however, until June 18, at which time, predictably, Savonarola denounced it as invalid. The friar also, however, obeyed the papal brief’s order to stop saying mass in public and for some months assumed an ambiguous posture somewhere between quiet obedience and passive resistance.
He burned with too much passion, however, to remain silent forever. On Christmas Day, sweeping aside the prohibitions imposed by his excommunication, he publicly said mass three times and distributed communion. The pope of course learned of this flagrant defiance but yet again did nothing. He continued to do nothing as, early in the new year, Savonarola resumed preaching in Florence’s cathedral (anyone opposing him was “supporting the kingdom of Satan”), thereby not only disobeying the pope but violating a municipal order to confine his oratory to his own friary church. Without question Alexander understood that the friar had become a real and present danger not only to him but to the Church and the security of Italy, but his continued passivity had political purpose. Rome was an enemy in the eyes of many Florentines, and aggressive action by the pope might not only have been defied but have cast Savonarola in the role of victim, causing the city to rally to his defense. Savonarola was on a path to self-destruction, and Alexander had no reason to get in his way.
At this point the story rises to tragedy and descends into farce. The head of a Franciscan monastery in Florence, fed up with the successes and presumption of the Dominican Savonarola, challenged him to a trial by fire—a test in which the two of them would be simultaneously burned at the stake, and God would be given the opportunity to intervene and save the life of whichever he favored. The Franciscan was obviously calling Savonarola’s bluff; he was said to be prepared for both of them to perish if his challenge was accepted, and to believe that his sacrifice would be worthwhile if it delivered the people of Florence from the grip of a lunatic.
Savonarola disappointed his adherents by not accepting. He then amused the cynics by allowing one of his associates to accept in his place, making it impossible to believe that he had refused on principle and difficult not to wonder if he might be a coward and a fraud. From Rome, Alexander and the College of Cardinals condemned the whole affair as barbaric and superstitious, but it went ahead anyway. When on April 7 thousands of people gathered in Florence’s great central piazza to witness what they hoped would be an immolation and perhaps a miracle as well, they found themselves having to listen to a tedious and interminable address in which Savonarola laid down conditions that he insisted must be fulfilled before the ordeal could proceed. He demanded that his surrogate, for example, be allowed to hold in his hands a consecrated communion host. When at length the flames were lit, a spring shower arrived to put them out. That ended it. The dampened crowd dispersed in a mood of surly dissatisfaction. Savonarola returned to his friary with his credibility in tatters.
He was so diminished a figure that Pope Alexander found it possible to leave his fate to the signoria in Florence, thereby sparing himself no end of trouble. Three trials ensued, in the course of which the friar was physically tortured and confessed himself guilty of a list of offenses that filled forty-two pages. A number of his most impressive prophecies, he said, had been based on information that his fellow Dominicans acquired in hearing confessions. On one occasion, he said, he had arranged for his prediction of attempted murder to be fulfilled by having a dish of poisoned lampreys fed to a cat (which promptly died) instead of to the man he had identified as the intended victim. Being the fruits of torture, these tales should have been given no weight, but they destroyed what remained of Savonarola’s reputation all the same. He and his two closest associates were condemned to death by hanging. They died with dignity, and in his final hour Savonarola denied everything that he had earlier confessed. Afterward his body was burned, the charred remains thrown into the River Arno to prevent the collection of relics. His removal had no impact on Florentine policy, which remained openly friendly to France.
Cesare, meanwhile, was moving to center stage in Rome. This was happening in part as a result of his own actions, starting with his role in the dissolution of Lucrezia’s marriage. Just why he was so determined to break the link that Pope Alexander had forged between the Borgias and the Sforzas is not clear—though the marriage had lost its political value, it was not a serious liability—and of Lucrezia’s attitude nothing at all is known. In spite of Cesare’s willingness to use his sister for his own ends it is impossible to doubt that the two were genuinely close, as we shall see repeatedly. Though there is no evidence that he was doing as Lucrezia wished in ridding her of her husband, there is also no evidence that he was ignoring or overriding her wishes. He certainly shared his late brother’s dislike for their brother-in-law, apparently a glum and passive figure with no appetite for the kinds of escapades in which the young Borgias were constantly involved, and it was his failure to conceal his antipathy that had provoked Sforza’s flight in disguise from Rome. Possibly Cesare regarded him, though he was a count and ruler of the handsome and prosperous seaside city of Pesaro, as unworthy of the beautiful Lucrezia. What mattered most, however, was Cesare’s growing awareness, as his ambition expanded in daring new directions, of just how useful his sister would be if she could be returned to the market as a virginal prospective bride.
This was proving to be difficult, however, because of Sforza’s refusal to cooperate. He could not be induced to confess to impotence, the grounds on which an annulment of the marriage was being sought, or to give up either Lucrezia or her dowry of thirty thousand florins. He was acutely aware that, as lord of a papal fief, he would be vastly more secure if he could restore good relations with the pope’s family, but in the absence of a way of making that happen he could only keep himself walled up inside his great moated rocca at Pesaro. The pressure, however, mounted steadily. Even the head of the Sforza family, Ludovico il Moro of Milan, declined to side with him, sensibly regarding a cousin’s marital difficulties as not worth a showdown with Rome. At last, having been promised that he could keep the dowry, Giovanni signed an admission that his marriage had never been consummated. Later he would write to Il Moro complaining that he had been coerced into doing so. The truth of the matter is anyone’s guess. On one hand, it is surely significant that in a later marriage Sforza would sire two children. On the other hand, it is at least curious that this was the only one of Lucrezia’s marriages that did not result in her rather quickly becoming pregnant.
In any case things worked out well enough from Cesare’s perspective. In December 1497 Lucrezia was summoned to the Vatican to hear the nullification of her marriage pronounced—to hear it declared that she had never been married, was at eighteen still virga intacta, and so remained entirely worthy of whatever lofty union the pope and her brother might be able to arrange for her. But suddenly new problems loomed—rumors that threatened to plunge her into irreversible disgrace. The gossips of Rome were saying that, in appearing at the Vatican, Lucrezia had been dressed in such a way as to conceal pregnancy. That her pregnancy was the result of a love affair with a young Spaniard named Pedro Calderón, a Vatican chamberlain. And that the two had become involved when Calderón (also referred to in various accounts as Pedro Caldes, and as Perotto or Pierotto) was employed as Pope Alexander’s courier, carrying messages to and from Lucrezia when she was living at the convent of San Sisto.
What makes this episode impossible to dismiss out of hand is the macabre fact that in February 1498, two months after the annulment, Calderón’s decomposing body, bound hand and foot, was pulled out of the Tiber. In the most colorful account of what had been going on, found in a report by the Venetian ambassador, Calderón had not been drowned but stabbed to death. By none other than Cardinal Cesare Borgia personally. After fleeing in terror to Pope Alexander, who was spattered with blood when the furious Cesare ran Calderón through with his sword. It is not easy to know what to make of this, and the varying opinions of writers across the centuries are so contradictory that they simply compound the uncertainty. Suffice it to say here that, judged against Lucrezia’s whole life story, the pregnancy seems highly improbable, the story about how Cesare supposedly murdered her lover in the presence of the pope extremely so. (For more on this question, and on how it has been treated by historians, the reader is directed to this page.)
The princes of Italy obviously gave little credence to the gossip, because as soon as her marriage was annulled, Alexander and Cesare had an impressive array of eager suitors to choose from. Among them were a young Orsini duke; the Riario who as Caterina Sforza’s eldest son was titular lord of Imola and Forlì; a leading member of the baronial Sanseverino clan of Naples; and a member of Naples’s royal family. There were expressions of interest from Spain as well. But the matter remained undecided when developments beyond the Alps changed the political status quo and confronted the Borgias with an entirely new set of challenges.
What happened first was that Charles VIII of France and Ferdinand of Spain astonished all Europe by announcing, in November 1497, that they were setting aside their differences and making peace. This was done largely for financial reasons, both kingdoms being nearly insolvent after years of conflict with numerous adversaries including each other, and no one could have expected it to last long. It was significant all the same, and not least for the Borgias: for the first time they found themselves free to deal on friendly terms with France without appearing to betray Spain. Within limits, of course. So long as they did nothing that conflicted directly with Ferdinand’s view of his own interests, they could explore possibilities that had been closed to them through all the years when keeping the friendship of Spain required shunning France.
But then, another and far bigger thunderbolt. Word came that Charles VIII was dead. It is appropriate that this incorrigibly foolish young monarch, still only twenty-seven and by all accounts sweet-natured and charming even when dealing face-to-face with enemies, should have perished in an odd, boyish, and distinctly unheroic way. He cracked his skull against the stone lintel of a castle doorway while playing jeu de paume—handball—and a short time later fell into a coma from which he never recovered. The ancient and royal House of Valois was at this time in the process of petering out, as one monarch after another either failed to produce heirs (who had to be male under France’s Salic law) or watched all his sons die early. Charles himself, sickly and ill formed, had not been born until his father was nearly fifty and was the only one of five brothers to live beyond infancy. Though he himself produced three legitimate sons and a daughter in the last six years of his life, not one of them survived him. Because he had no paternal uncles or male first cousins, his heir was his second cousin Louis, the same duke of Orléans who had joined him on the march to Naples and claimed to be rightful duke of Milan. Now King Louis XII, he was himself thirty-five and childless in spite of having been married for more than twenty years. He was also a seasoned and shrewd politician who had been through some hard times, including three years as a prisoner of his father-in-law King Louis XI, Charles VIII’s father. It was obvious from the start that his coronation was likely to have consequences for the Italians. He immediately reasserted his old claim to Milan as well as appropriating to himself Charles’s claim to Naples.
While the ruling families of Milan and Naples should have been frightened and undoubtedly were, for Cesare Borgia the new situation was rich in promise. He remained enthralled by the thought of a princess he had never met, Don Fadrique of Naples’s daughter Carlotta. What he knew of her made her seem the perfect bride: eldest child of a king whose only son was still a boy; great-granddaughter of a king of France; a lady-in-waiting at the French court, where she had been sent to be brought up when her mother died not long after her birth. The man who married her could be confident of becoming one of the leading lords of Naples and of being accepted into the French royal family. And only one life, that of a very young brother-in-law, would stand between Carlotta herself and the Neapolitan crown.
Soundings were taken in Naples, and the results were not encouraging: Don Fadrique showed no interest in marrying his daughter to Cesare. The fact that Cesare was a cardinal of the Church is itself sufficient to explain the king’s wariness, but beyond that the summer that Cesare had spent in Naples had obviously done nothing to enhance his attractiveness as a possible son-in-law. Whatever his opinion of Cesare personally, Don Fadrique probably thought that his father Ferrante and brother Alfonso II had bestowed quite enough Neapolitan riches on various Borgias, especially in connection with Sancia’s marriage to Jofrè. But with a new king of France now in the picture, and Carlotta virtually that king’s ward, Don Fadrique’s feelings would not necessarily decide the issue. If Louis could be won over, Don Fadrique might find it difficult not to go along.
And there were ways of winning Louis over. The pope, as it happened, had the power to grant something that the French king wanted at least as much as he wanted Milan, probably even more: the annulment of his marriage. Alexander for his part, having by this time digested whatever regrets he may have felt over Cesare’s determination to abandon his clerical career, made it known to Louis that he wanted essentially nothing for himself but several big things for Cesare. He wanted Carlotta, plus a high place in the French nobility, plus sources of income commensurate with that place. Pope and king alike could see that the ingredients were in place for a thoroughly satisfactory arrangement. Soon they were well along with intricate, and secret, negotiations.
Rather oddly, it was Cesare’s determination to make Carlotta his wife, Alexander’s acquiescence, and above all Don Fadrique’s reluctance that decided Lucrezia’s fate. The pope’s representatives in Naples reported that, whatever his doubts about Cesare, Don Fadrique was quite open to a marriage of the cardinal’s sister to his late brother Alfonso’s illegitimate son and namesake, the brother of Sancia Borgia. He was more than just open, actually; to Fadrique such a marriage seemed an opportunity, a necessary gesture of goodwill, a way of tempering his rejection of Cesare and preventing it from spoiling his relations with the papal court. Cesare for his part must have seen it as a step toward winning Carlotta, and the pope was agreeable. In preparation for a wedding young Alfonso was elevated to duke of Bisceglie, and Don Fadrique agreed to Alexander’s request that Lucrezia never be required to live in Naples so long as he remained alive. (That the aging pontiff made this request is the most poignant testimony we possess to the neediness in his attachment to Lucrezia.) A simple wedding was performed in Rome in July 1498, with a lack of pomp that was in sharp contrast to the bride’s first wedding.
It was fortuitous, considering the cynical calculations that brought it about, that the marriage turned out to be a happy one. Bride and groom were well suited: Alfonso charming, cheerful, handsome, and almost exactly Lucrezia’s age, Lucrezia a well-bred, intelligent, beguilingly good-natured beauty. Together they settled into a life of easeful enjoyment at the center of a social set of high-born young Romans in which Alfonso’s sister Sancia, who with her husband Jofrè had been allowed to return from Squillace, also figured prominently. The House of Borgia and the House of Aragon were now connected not only through Jofrè’s and Lucrezia’s marriages but also because, back in Spain, the late Juan’s little son the third duke of Gandía was related to Ferdinand and Isabella through his mother. One more such union, of Cesare and Princess Carlotta, must have seemed an entirely realistic objective. It would require nothing more than a single repetition of an established pattern.
What next commanded attention was Louis XII’s annulment. He had an admirable queen—she would be canonized a saint four and a half centuries after her death—but his wish to be rid of her is not hard to understand. She was Jeanne of France, so called because her father was King Louis XI; it was at his direction that she had been married to her cousin Louis duke of Orléans when both were about twelve years old. The marriage was amicable enough though childless and devoid of passion, but the unexpected death of Jeanne’s younger brother Charles VIII had not only made her husband king but given him reason to question whether the union should continue. At issue was not only Louis’s new status as a monarch without a son and heir but the equally big question of whether the great duchy of Brittany was going to remain part of France or revert to what it had been for centuries, a separate and sovereign principality.
Brittany had become loosely and not irrevocably united with France as a result of the 1491 marriage of Charles VIII and Anne of Brittany, sole living child of Brittany’s last duke. That marriage appears to have been a surprisingly happy one; the dignified, devout, and rather beautiful Anne loved her gnomish little husband despite his physical and moral deficiencies, and in spite also of his promiscuity and his practice of sharing their bedchamber with his groomsmen and hunting dogs. But when all four of their children died in infancy and then Charles met his end on a handball court, France lost its claim to Brittany, which reverted to being an independent state with Anne as its sovereign. The only way for Louis XII to recover it, and keep it out of other hands, was to marry Anne himself. Which was not possible if he already had a wife. Which is why he wanted something only the Church could grant.
Alexander set out not only to accommodate Louis, but to do so in accordance with the letter of the law. In July 1498 he established a tribunal to hear the king’s case, signaling his eagerness to be helpful by appointing as one of its two leaders Archbishop Georges d’Amboise of Rouen, a trusted friend of Louis and for years his chief minister. The proceedings, however, soon turned unpleasant, a precursor of what would happen a generation later when Henry VIII of England demanded that the Church rid him of Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Catherine of Aragon. When Louis testified that Jeanne’s deformities had made it impossible to consummate their marriage, the queen tearfully denied that this was true.
While the commissioners continued with the tedious business of assembling evidence and hearing arguments in France and Rome, pope and king entered into a secret agreement that shows how much Louis was prepared to pay. With respect to Cesare’s matrimonial hopes, he would promise only to encourage Carlotta to consent, insisting that everything must depend, in the end, on her doing so freely. But beyond that, he promised everything the pope had asked and more: for Cesare the title duke of Valentinois; the lordship of two French counties that together would bring him twenty thousand gold ducats per annum; a royal subsidy in the same amount; command of a thousand or more mounted soldiers to be maintained at royal expense; and the lordship of Asti as soon as France won possession of Milan. These were extraordinary benefactions. And Louis capped them by offering to make Cesare a member of his hyperexclusive Order of St. Michel, a kind of French Round Table that he regarded as the highest honor within his power to bestow.
It is improbable that the king disgorged this much bounty simply to get an annulment. His lawyers would have advised him that the strength of his case made such generosity unnecessary. Quite apart from the question of consummation, the extreme youth of both parties and the fact that they had been ordered to marry by the king made it impossible that their union had involved free and responsible commitment on either side. Louis’s largesse is likely to have had more to do with his ambitions in Italy and his memory of the difficulties that Alexander’s refusal to cooperate had created for Charles VIII. As little as the king was demanding at this stage, Alexander must have been aware that he was likely to demand a good deal more later, when he returned with an army to Italy. The agreement was, not explicitly but by clear implication, a reversal of papal policy, an abandonment of the consistency with which Alexander had refused to acquiesce in Charles VIII’s invasion and opposed possible future incursions. Spain’s rulers, understandably enough, interpreted the whole arrangement as a betrayal. Though Alexander had not repudiated his decades-old friendship with the Spanish crown, he definitely had put it at risk.
One nagging detail remained to be addressed: Cesare was pursuing a wife and becoming a vassal of the king of France while still a member of the College of Cardinals. He needed to get out from under his red hat. On August 14, 1498, he donned the full regalia of a prince of the Church for the last time—that in itself was a dramatic gesture, Cesare being rarely seen in clerical attire—and appeared before the pope and his fellow prelates. He asked to be allowed to resign from the college and revert to the lay world. Unique though this request was in the centuries-long history of the Sacred College, there was no obstacle in canon law to its being granted, Cesare in his five years as a cardinal never having taken the perpetual vows that priestly ordination entailed. The reasons he gave for requesting release were disarmingly persuasive. He simply told his colleagues what was obviously true: that he had never wanted an ecclesiastical career, had not been consulted before being placed on the path to one while still a child, and knew himself to be so utterly unsuited to life as a churchman that he could only remain in it at the risk of his immortal soul. The only objections came from those few members of the Sacred College who regarded themselves as being under more obligation to Ferdinand and Isabella than to Alexander, and for whom it would have been imprudent to cooperate in the transformation of a Spanish cardinal into a French duke. The college voted to leave the decision with the pope, and so the deed was done. Cesare was permitted to remove himself from a life of total and permanent security, giving up benefices generating an income of some 35,000 ducats annually, and hurl himself into an unforeseeable future.
Consequences followed quickly. Alexander, knowing how angry Ferdinand and Isabella would be when they learned of this, attempted to placate them by granting very nearly the only thing they wanted that he, as pope, had it in his power to grant. He ceded to them increased authority over the Church in Spain and their many other possessions including those in the New World. Most momentously, and with famously tragic consequences, he freed them to use the Spanish Inquisition as they wished and so to intensify their persecution of Muslims, Jews, and whichever Christians they chose to find suspect. Alexander’s rapprochement with France also dealt a near-fatal blow to whatever remained of friendship between Rome and Milan, opening up a wide gulf between himself on one side and Ludovico and Ascanio Sforza on the other. The Colonna and Orsini were so alarmed by these developments that they brought an end to a vicious little war in which they had been fighting each other for territory, formed an alliance, and threw in with Milan. Even Naples soon joined them, Lucrezia’s marriage to the duke of Bisceglie being not nearly sufficient to overcome Don Fadrique’s fear of the impending French invasion. The willingness of four such improbable parties to form an alliance showed just how frightened all of them were by the rapprochement of Rome and Louis XII. Alexander tried to reassure them, insisting that his understanding with France was strictly a personal matter, limited to finding a place in the world for Cesare and changing nothing politically. He cannot have expected to be believed, but his words created just enough uncertainty to buy a little time. Maintaining lines of communication with Milan and Naples, and making certain that the existence of those lines became the worst-kept secret in Europe, enabled him to keep Louis from becoming too complacent as well.
The atmosphere in Rome grew thick with tension. On All Saints’ Day, when Alexander said mass in public at St. Peter’s Basilica, he did so behind a shield of armed Spanish guards. Days later, in consistory, Ascanio Sforza accused him of risking the destruction of all Italy by connecting himself to France. “Are you aware, monsignor,” a scornful Alexander replied to his onetime friend, “that it was your brother who invited the French into Italy?” An even sharper exchange took place three days before Christmas, when envoys freshly arrived from Ferdinand and Isabella warned the pope that if he continued on his present course, he was going to find himself answering to a general council of the Church. Both sides spoke with brutal frankness, and both must have been startled by the things being said. The Spaniards accused Alexander of simony and of nepotism beyond the bounds of reason. Alexander went further, declaring that Ferdinand and Isabella were usurpers with no right to their thrones. Told that God had punished him with the death of the duke of Gandía, the pope retorted that God had punished Ferdinand and Isabella far more severely in taking their only son.
Such intemperate words were so untypical of the usually unflappable Alexander that one shocked observer attributed them to a secret fear that the deal with France had been a colossal mistake. Things escalated from there, with Portugal soon joining Spain in threatening to summon a council and, by implication, elect a new pope. Louis XII sent assurances that there was nothing to fear—that the agreement binding Spain to France made it impossible for Ferdinand to act on his threats. All the same, the hostility of the Spanish royals must have made Alexander wonder if he had made a perilously wrong turn. That his actions in coming to terms with France had been so widely at variance with his own political instincts is a good measure of just how much influence Cesare now had over him.
Cesare by this time was in France and making himself at home at King Louis’s court. He had departed Rome on October 1, at the end of a period of immensely costly preparations. It was said that all the gold, silver, silk, and jewels to be found in the shops of Rome had been bought up for his use. Then, when everything was in readiness, he had refused to go until his face cleared of an eruption of the symptoms of syphilis. When he finally set out, his retinue was so large, its baggage so mountainous, that hundreds of mules were needed for transporting it to the coast. Whole days were required to get everyone and everything aboard a fleet of galleys at Civitavecchia, and the expedition did not reach Marseilles until October 19. Hundreds of thousands of ducats had been raised to pay for all this, and the means by which they were raised were sometimes appalling. No one thought it a coincidence that just at this time the master of the papal household, an aged Spanish bishop, abruptly found himself arrested on charges of heresy and obliged to surrender his riches to secure his release. All this so that a recently (if voluntarily) defrocked clergyman who had just passed his twenty-fourth birthday could show the French that he was a personage of the highest importance and worthy of a royal bride.
Louis saw to it that Cesare was received with all possible honors. His arrival at Marseilles was made a grand event, almost a public holiday, and similar formalities were repeated at every stop along his way. At Touraine he met Louis for the first time, and at the onetime papal capital of Avignon he was given an improbably warm welcome by the city’s archbishop—none other than Pope Alexander’s old foe Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. Still in self-imposed exile, della Rovere had resigned himself to the fact that he could hope to gain nothing by remaining hostile to the Borgias if Louis XII was now their friend. From Avignon Cesare moved in stately procession to his ducal seat at Valence, then to Lyons, rejoining Louis at the ancient hilltop palace of Chinon a week before Christmas.
For his entry into Chinon Cesare pulled out all the stops. He had himself dressed in cloth of silver and gold, his horse draped with jewels and pearls and fitted with silver shoes. When he came through the city gates, however, the onlooking crowds found him not so much impressive as ridiculous. They snickered up their sleeves, muttering that ostentation on such a scale might have befitted a Roman emperor but on a Spanish provincial was sheer excess. It is characteristic of Cesare that he noted these japes and took a lesson from them. For the rest of his life he would dress in simple black, his only adornment the emblem of King Louis’s Order of St. Michel that hung from a chain around his neck. In matters of attire as in all things, he was a quick learner and rarely made the same mistake twice.
Once inside Chinon castle and quit of his bejeweled horse, Cesare presented Louis with a papal bull freshly arrived from Rome. It was the longed-for dispensa, declaring the work of the annulment commission complete, the king’s request granted. The nullification was based not on nonconsummation, which could not be proved, but on an eminently legitimate finding that at the time of their wedding both bride and groom had been under royal coercion and too young to bind themselves for life. Having delivered that good news, Cesare further delighted his hosts by unveiling a second bull, this one appointing Archbishop d’Amboise to the College of Cardinals. Both Cesare and Carlotta of Naples were in attendance when, on January 6, 1499, Anne of Brittany was married to Louis XII. Cesare was continuing to press for a betrothal of his own and was continuing to get nonanswers. The king, who by now had secured everything he had hoped for in inviting Cesare to France, nevertheless continued to support his young visitor’s cause. Don Fadrique’s answer was always the same, an echo of what Louis had said earlier: Carlotta would not be forced into a marriage she did not want. Cesare must have been aware, by this point, that Carlotta was in love with a young count, a member of one of Brittany’s most eminent families, and was unwilling to consider any other suitor.
Cesare found himself in a kind of limbo, almost a hostage. To go home unmarried, after all that he and the pope had done to obtain a royal bride, would have been a humiliation. And so he remained at Chinon, waiting for … it was no longer quite clear what he was waiting for. Weeks passed, and then months, and still he was frozen in place. Young ladies from the fringes of the royal family were put on display for his consideration, but nothing came of that. One consolation was that Louis, in contrast to Don Fadrique of Naples, had taken a liking to Cesare, giving every appearance of enjoying his company and genuinely wanting to help him. There is nothing surprising in this. Physically so attractive that people spoke of him as the handsomest man in Italy, Cesare also had the same bright good nature as the pope and his sister Lucrezia. He had been given the nickname Valentino when, barely grown, he was made the archbishop of Valencia. It remained appropriate, and in use, now that he was duke of Valentinois. The dashing Valentino would have been a welcome addition to any Renaissance court. Young as he was, though, the pleasures of a courtier’s life did not satisfy. He wanted to get on with things. His fate depended entirely on the support of a pope who, though still vital and vibrant, was now approaching seventy. That made Cesare a young man in a hurry.
But winter passed and spring came, and still nothing changed. It must have been maddening, now that he was a duke and supposedly a soldier and no longer constrained by the claims of the Church, to have to remain idle in Chinon as couriers brought news of momentous developments in the outside world. Being at the French court, he would have been among the first to learn, in February 1499, of Louis’s entry into an agreement with Venice for the partition of the duchy of Milan. He would have understood immediately what this meant: that with any possibility of Venetian assistance removed, the Sforzas of Milan were doomed. A Milan without major allies was indefensible against France, and the fall of the Sforzas would mean that the road to Naples was open once again. Ferdinand of Spain, when he learned of the agreement, was so furious that he recalled his ambassadors not only from Venice but from Rome. These were portentous developments for Europe, for Italy, for Rome, and of course for Cesare himself.
That the possibility of stopping Louis simply did not exist sheds an intriguing if uncertain light on Cesare’s mission to France. It raises the question of whether perhaps there was more to that mission than a quest for a bride, a title, and wealth. It was a quest for those things, without question, but it also created a relationship, a friendship, that had the potential to save both the Borgia papacy and the sovereignty of Rome. Friendship with an invincible invader could mean safety, survival. Surviving could mean continuing to have options—a chance, at least, of controlling one’s own destiny. It is difficult to believe that none of this had occurred to Alexander by the time he decided to go to such lengths, financial and otherwise, to help make Cesare’s journey a success. In other words, it is not at all certain that Alexander had become incapable of pursuing or even formulating his own policies rather than simply doing whatever Cesare wished. If he was not actively and autonomously attempting to thread his way between the Scylla that was Spain and the Charybdis of France, he was certainly allowing nothing to happen that might close off any of his options.
The most terrible danger remained clear: that by befriending Louis the pope would make enemies of Ferdinand and Isabella. If this came to pass, his options, his freedom to make choices, would be reduced or possibly even destroyed. He urgently needed to repair his old relationship with Spain, therefore, if only to preserve the possibility that eventually he could play off the two great powers against each other and prevent either from taking control of all Italy. How this might be accomplished, however, was by no means obvious. Ferdinand blamed Alexander when it became apparent that French boots would soon be tramping across Italian soil once again and that he had no way of doing anything about it. Isabella for her part was growing sick of the Borgias: the bad behavior of the late Juan, Cesare’s wild reputation capped by his departure from the Church, Alexander’s move toward France. By springtime it was the declared position of the Spanish government that the election of Alexander VI had been invalid and that a council must be called to put things right. Spain was supported in this not only by Portugal as before but also, now, by that other opponent of French expansion, the Hapsburg emperor Maximilian. The pope’s situation was becoming seriously dangerous.
Alexander set out to do what he could to reduce the number of things that the Spanish monarchs had to be angry about without undercutting Cesare’s position at Chinon. In response to complaints about how the Church was being stripped bare for the enrichment of the Borgias, he took the Italian duchy of Benevento from the little duke of Gandía and restored direct papal rule. Two months later, to address concerns about the influence of the young Borgias at the papal court, he ordered Lucrezia and Jofrè to once again leave Rome, taking up residence this time in Spoleto and thus reducing their visibility. Interestingly—we get here an indication of the pope’s opinion of the two youngest Borgias—Lucrezia rather than Jofrè was given responsibilities that made her, in effect, governor of Spoleto, in charge of its civil administration. These duties she carried out conscientiously under the watchful eyes of experienced counselors provided for the purpose. She did so in spite of being far along with a second pregnancy (earlier she had suffered a miscarriage, apparently as the result of a fall) and in spite of the embarrassment of having a second husband run away in fear. The duke of Bisceglie, as a new French invasion became a certainty, had understood the implications of Alexander’s new relationship with Louis and concluded like Giovanni Sforza before him that he was not safe in Rome. He fled first to refuge in the castles of the Colonna, then home to Naples. He wrote asking Lucrezia to join him, but his letters were intercepted by the pope. Alexander sent an envoy to Don Fadrique with instructions to return Bisceglie to Rome. The king, wanting no trouble, agreed to make this happen—but not quite yet. When Bisceglie finally did rejoin his wife, he did so not at Rome but at her own domain of Spoleto, which promised to be far less dangerous.
And then from France came great news: a letter from Louis informing Alexander that Cesare was married. Not to Carlotta of Naples, but to the beautiful nineteen-year-old Charlotte d’Albret, daughter of an old French family of the highest distinction and sister of the king of Navarre. Louis reported gleefully that the validity of the union was safe from challenge because Cesare had “broken his lance” no fewer than eight times on his wedding night, adding admiringly that this was double the total he himself had achieved on his first night with Anne of Brittany. Thus it mattered not at all that the bride had been less than eager and had agreed to the union only after being urged by the French king, Anne of Brittany, and her own family. The wedding was performed in the queen’s apartment at the palace of Blois. It had been arranged in the nick of time; not long thereafter Louis’s great army was on the road, marching to Italy. Its lead units were commanded by Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, an experienced and respected condottierewho had been born into the Milanese nobility and begun his military career in the service of the Sforzas but defected to France when Ludovico il Moro promoted a rival over him. Trivulzio was a man with something to prove, and in his quest for vindication he pressed forward aggressively. The king and the rest of the army followed at a leisurely pace, accompanied by, among many other dignitaries, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere and Duke Valentino. Cesare had used some of the wealth he had taken with him to France to hire mercenary troops for Louis XII’s use, and Alexander had contributed still others. Behind this generosity lay an understanding: once Milan was secure, Louis would release a portion of his army—a much larger force than the thousand troops put at Cesare’s disposal when he was made duke of Valentinois—for the use of the Borgias.
Milan fell with remarkable ease. At the start of September, with Trivulzio bearing down on him, Ludovico Sforza abandoned his capital and joined his brother-in-law Emperor Maximilian in the Tyrolean Alps, taking with him his two small sons, his brother Cardinal Ascanio, and a fortune in gold and jewels. He might not have given up quite so easily if his wife Beatrice d’Este had been on hand to stiffen his spine, but her death two years earlier, still only twenty-one years old, had deprived him of his most trusted source of counsel. When Trivulzio took possession of the city of Milan on September 11, Louis and his retinue were still far behind, crossing the mountains from Grenoble to Turin. The king would not make his own grand entry into Milan until early October, but before that happened his mastery of the whole of the duchy would be complete. All this was capped by expressions of friendship from Ferdinand of Spain, which freed Louis to focus on the consolidation of his gains and ponder his options where his claim to the crown of Naples was concerned.
The conquest of Milan seemed a vindication of Alexander’s alliance with France. Louis XII’s effortless success, coupled with the commitments he had made to the pope, ensured that the Borgias would now have the resources to pursue their own objectives in the Papal States. As a kind of bonus, Ferdinand’s determination to remain at least temporarily on amicable terms with France left him with no option except to put aside his grievances against the pope, Alexander as well as Rome now being in effect under French protection. For the first time in a long time Alexander found himself free not just to react to the actions of others but to take the initiative, and to do so in his own interests.
He did so with as much boldness as he had ever shown in his life, declaring that all the lords of the Romagna had forfeited their right to the cities their families had ruled for generations, in some cases for centuries. The scope of the bull with which he did this was breathtaking. It excommunicated several of the most important families in northern Italy: the Riarii of Imola and Forlì, the Malatesta of Rimini, the Manfredi of Faenza, the Varani of Camerino, and Giovanni Sforza in Pesaro. It even extended to the Montefeltri of Urbino, whose domain was outside the Romagna. All were declared dispossessed. They were to be replaced by one man, a new papal vicar for all the affected states: Cesare Borgia, duke of Valentinois.
The pope’s act, if shocking, was entirely lawful, the lords in question being not only without legitimacy in many cases but years behind in paying tribute to Rome. Nor was it unjustified, when one considers the hard methods employed by most of those same lords to maintain control of the places they ruled, and the problems that their lawlessness created for Italy at large.
No words inscribed on a sheet of vellum, however, were going to get them to surrender control. That was going to require force. Force that would be applied by Valentino.