17

Conqueror

The winter of 1500–1501, like most winters before the industrial revolution brought mechanized all-weather warfare, was a peaceful interval between the close of one fighting season and the opening of another. Lucrezia Borgia, now a twenty-year-old dowager duchess with a baby son, passed the cold months sequestered in the papal stronghold of Nepi, adapting to life without her husband. Her brother Cesare and their patron the pope remained in Rome, where they occupied themselves with, among other matters of state, deciding where to marry her next. Barely five months after the duke of Bisceglie’s murder, Pope Alexander had announced Lucrezia’s betrothal to the young Francesco Orsini, duke of Gravina. That plan had come to nothing, perhaps because such a union could not be reconciled with Alexander’s determination to break the Orsini, perhaps because it became obvious that Lucrezia could be used to bag bigger game.

As in the period after the annulment of Lucrezia’s first marriage, there was no shortage of suitors. By January 1501, however, Alexander and Cesare were focusing their aspirations on a prospect who not only had no wish to make Lucrezia his wife but was grimly hostile to the idea. This was Alfonso d’Este, who as eldest son of Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara was a scion of one of the oldest noble families in Europe and heir to a city-state that, if not as brilliant as Florence or as mighty as Venice, did not fall far short of ranking among Italy’s leading powers. The Este married in only the loftiest of circles: Alfonso was a grandson of Ferrante of Naples, his sisters had wed Ludovico il Moro of Milan and Francesco Gonzaga, marquess of Mantua, and his own short-lived first wife had been a daughter and sister of Sforza dukes. It was no less desirable for Lucrezia to become one of them than it had been to connect Cesare to the French royal family.

More than prestige was at stake. Because Ferrara lay just north of the Romagna, it could serve as a valuable ally, a northern shield, for the state that Cesare was assembling for himself there. Conversely, it had the potential to become a threat to the achievement of Cesare’s plans. A basis for friendship between the two families existed in the person of Louis XII: the Este had traditionally found it advantageous to be attentive to the wishes of the French crown, and in 1501 that history put them, ipso facto, on friendly terms with the Borgias as well. On the other hand the Este had lately been on bloodily bad terms with their mighty neighbors the Venetians. Fear of Venice kept them chronically in search of allies.

Negotiation of a possible marriage began that January. Longtime Borgia retainer Ramiro de Lorqua, the grimly tough veteran of the wars of Spanish unification whom Cesare had left in charge of Imola and Forlì, served as go-between. In the early going the Borgias did all the proposing, the Este merely listening with an air of detachment, and there seemed little likelihood of success. The fact that the Borgias had produced two popes in forty years was not nearly sufficient to impress the proud House of Este, which had a history as rich in betrayal and murder as any warlord family in Italy but was of such antiquity that its roots disappeared among the higher nobility of Germany in the murky depths of the Dark Ages. Like all leading families, the Este took pains to keep themselves informed of events at the papal court, and through their agents they had heard enough stories to make some of them think it inconceivable that Lucrezia could possibly be a suitable bride for the duke’s heir. Duke Ercole’s daughter Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, marquessa of Mantua and one of the most cultivated women that Renaissance Italy would produce, became almost shrill in her opposition. She was echoed by her husband’s sister, the wife of Duke Guidobaldo da Montefeltro of Urbino, who though not an Este herself was offended by the thought of even an indirect connection with the parvenu Spaniards. The prospective bridegroom Alfonso, not unintelligent but coarse-natured, interested less in arts and letters and the niceties of court life than in the smoky foundry where he spent his days conducting experiments in the manufacture of artillery, was characteristically blunt in declaring that no such marriage was going to take place. Faced with all this, and with Duke Ercole’s refusal to be impressed with the pope’s explanations of why an alliance with Rome would be good for Ferrara and a refusal of the marriage would be bad, Alexander and Cesare turned to Louis of France for help.

Meanwhile there was much else to be done. With the arrival of spring Cesare was able to bring his troops out of winter quarters and increase the pressure on Faenza, which he had kept under siege for half a year now. Toward the end of April the city’s stout-hearted young lord, Astorre Manfredi, yielded to the inevitable and agreed to hand his city over on condition that it would not be plundered and its population not mistreated. Cesare was scrupulous in honoring his pledge; he was making it his practice to deal generously with people and places whose lord he intended to remain, thereby winning the loyalty of cities accustomed to the random cruelties of sadists. When he moved on from Faenza, Astorre went with him, whether as a prisoner or a volunteer addition to the papal army is not clear.

In the first great bluff of his military career, Cesare moved his troops toward Bologna. Though an attack on the city was politically impossible, Louis XII having taken it under his protection, this was not something on which Bolognese strongman Giovanni Bentivoglio could bet his future. He had no way of being confident either that the French king would honor his promises or that his young adversary would be deterred by those promises. Therefore he was frightened and scrambled to prepare his defenses while sending appeals to Louis for help. In fact Cesare appreciated the risks of flouting the French king’s instructions and was far too canny to incur those risks. His target was not Bologna but its satellite town of Castel Bolognese, the last strongpoint on the Via Emilia between Imola and Rimini not yet in his possession

As it happened, Louis had disliked Bentivoglio at least since the latter had been one of the few warlords to support Ludovico il Moro’s futile attempt to fend off the invasion of Milan. He could, however, see no advantage in allowing Cesare to add a prize as important as Bologna to his fast-growing list of conquests. He split the difference, forbidding Cesare to attack Bologna but ordering Bentivoglio to give up Castel Bolognese. In the settlement worked out by Cesare’s representatives and an angry Bentivoglio, Bologna not only ceded Castel Bolognese but pledged to provide the papal army with hundreds of troops for the next three years and to cooperate with its future incursions into the Romagna. Back in Rome, Alexander celebrated this success by bestowing on Cesare the title duke of Romagna—Duca Valentino di Romagna. With Imola, Castel Bolognese, Faenza, Forlì, Cesena, Rimini, and Pesaro all now firmly in his hands, Duke Valentino was master of more of the Romagna than anyone had been in centuries and was the region’s duke. Louis XII thought he should be satisfied.

Pope Alexander evidently thought the same thing. Though summer had barely begun, he sent instructions for Cesare to post garrisons at his latest conquests and return to Rome. Cesare did as he was told—or nearly so. He marched his army out of the Romagna, but instead of taking the direct route to Rome, he headed westward into Tuscany, onto Florence’s home ground. This was a bold move, easily interpreted as an act of defiance of the French, and it delighted Cesare’s condottiere Vitellozzo Vitelli and his Orsini colleagues, who had not stopped hoping for a chance to assault Florence. Cesare, however, cannot have planned any such attack—the risks would have been too great. He must have been pleased, even relieved, to be still ten miles from the city when a delegation sent by the Florentine signori came riding up to greet him. Talks ensued, and a battle of nerves. The leaders of the republic were able to take small comfort, under these circumstances, from Louis XII’s promise of protection. The only French troops in the neighborhood were under Cesare’s command, and he was obviously using them for his own purposes, as usual telling no one what he intended to do.

His objective, obvious in hindsight, was to frighten the Florentines and extract whatever concessions he could while the city was helpless. He knew that the French had more pressing concerns than the protection of Florence—Louis was on the verge of beginning his advance on Naples—and would hesitate to take a hard line with Rome at the exact point where their need for the papal army was greatest. Assuming of course that Cesare did not go so far as to attack the city of Florence itself, which the French could never have accepted.

What Florence’s envoys wanted was simple: their instructions were to get Cesare out of Tuscany as quickly, and at as little cost, as possible. To this end they offered him a three-year condotta paying 36,000 ducats annually. It would have been a stiff price if accompanied by any intention to actually pay, but the Florentines appear to have had no such intention. It was their turn to be relieved when Cesare, eager to be on his way before King Louis got word of what he was doing and had an opportunity to object, accepted their offer and put his army back on the road. Moving down the Arno valley toward the sea, he freed his mercenaries to pillage at their pleasure. This was customary, a way of keeping mercenary troops satisfied, and Cesare saw no reason to care what the people of the area thought of him. He had no expectation of ever needing their loyalty.

On June 4 he reached the little city-state of Piombino on the west coast and brought it under siege. It lay on the northwest frontier of Tuscany, so that if he could take it, he would have Florence virtually encircled. He was unable to tarry, however; word came that Louis XII was marching southward, wanted his troops back, and expected Cesare to join him. Cesare had no choice but to obey, but he detached enough troops to maintain the siege. Some of Piombino’s most valuable possessions, including the island of Elba with its iron mines, had already surrendered. The job of taking the city itself was assigned to Vitellozzo Vitelli, one of Italy’s first experts in the use of artillery. He could be relied upon to press the siege hard, not because he was trustworthy but because he was driven. He regarded the reduction of Piombino as a step toward the goal that obsessed him: the defeat of the Florentine Republic and the destruction of the men responsible for what in his eyes had been an unforgivable wrong. To the rulers of Florence, who were all too aware of his obsession, he seemed a kind of archfiend, an implacable and malignant force, and a traitor as well.

They had good reasons for thinking so. Though at age forty-four Vitelli was as effective a soldier as was to be found in Italy, an innovator in the employment of artillery and infantry, he was also something very like a homicidal psychopath. He and his brother and partner Paolo, sons of the family that had held the little city-state of Città di Castello in a tight grip for generations, had in the late 1490s been hired by Florence to take command of the war on Pisa. They were an improbable choice, being related by marriage to the Orsini and therefore to the exiled Medici, but their military reputations must have made the risk seem acceptable. Their personal reputations were a very different matter. Paolo was a murderous brute of the classic warlord type, notorious for such acts as chopping off the hands and putting out the eyes of captured enemy musketeers because he thought it outrageous that common foot soldiers suddenly possessed the means of bringing down armored and mounted knights. Vitellozzo was not much better, taking undisguised pleasure in unleashing his troops on defenseless civilians, but as they brought Pisa under siege, all seemed well enough from the Florentine perspective.

At the climax of that siege, in 1499, something occurred that was bizarre even by condottieri standards. When their men broke through Pisa’s defenses, the Vitelli brothers not only didn’t urge them on or lead them into the city but instead intervened bodily to force them back, enabling the defenders to regroup and seal the hole. The authorities in Florence, baffled and infuriated, decided that the Vitelli either had been bribed or had decided to keep the war from being won in order to continue being paid. Paolo was seized and taken to Florence for beheading. Vitellozzo escaped and from that point forward was sunk in bitterness and consumed by his hunger for revenge. His disposition was not improved—neither was his judgment—by a case of syphilis so debilitating that often he had to be carried about on a litter. He was a good enough fighting man to be a useful lieutenant when kept on a short leash, but devoid of scruples and dangerously unpredictable.

Having given Vitelli his orders, Cesare postponed his rendezvous with the French army long enough to make a flying visit to Rome. He found Pope Alexander in a state of uncharacteristic agitation, upset by Venetian complaints about Cesare’s actions in the Romagna. The centuries-old fragmentation of the Romagna into a patchwork of quarrelsome petty fiefdoms had kept it too weak to be a problem even for neighbors as near as Venice. Those fiefdoms had been able to remain at least quasi-autonomous because neither Milan nor Venice would allow the other to seize them outright. But now, with Cesare pulling its pieces together, the Romagna had the potential to become a serious problem indeed—not least for Venice, and especially for Venice if a Borgia-Este marriage led to an alliance between Cesare’s new duchy and Venice’s old foe Ferrara. Such worries were making a mess of Alexander’s efforts to work with Venice in resisting the advance of the Turks. In May 1501 he had brought Rome, Venice, and Hungary together in a new anti-Ottoman league, but already the Venetians were threatening to pull out. It was becoming all too clear that Cesare’s ambitions might not always be compatible with the priorities of the pope from whom he drew his strength.

Cesare was in Rome when Alexander issued a bull that approved the Franco-Spanish agreement to partition Naples and excommunicated Don Fadrique, declaring that he had forfeited his crown by attempting to ally himself with the Turks. The charge was true, but it was far from unheard-of for European and even Italian rulers to look to the Muslim world for help when finding themselves in difficulty, and such renegade behavior had never drawn such a harsh response. At about the same time, probably as a way of returning the favor and possibly as the result of an explicit quid pro quo arrangement, Louis XII began pressuring Duke Ercole d’Este to agree to the Borgia marriage. When Alfonso d’Este persisted in refusing, his widower father threatened to marry Lucrezia himself. Ercole was prepared to accept the marriage if doing so would keep Ferrara in the good graces of France and if the price was right. With one additional proviso: it had to be established that Lucrezia’s personal history and conduct were not of such a nature as to disgrace the Este name. As negotiations proceeded and the pope remained almost foolishly eager, tough old Ercole focused on two things: learning as much as he could about Lucrezia’s character, and seeing how far he could raise his demands without mortally offending Alexander.

Suddenly everything seemed to be happening at once. By the time Cesare and his troops joined up with the French army as it passed near Rome—for reasons unknown, he imprisoned Astorre Manfredi in the Castel Sant’Angelo before departing—Piombino was surrendering. A grimly triumphant Vitellozzo Vitelli was thus able to add most of his men to Louis XII’s invasion force. Yet another new league was formed, this one for the purpose of arranging the affairs of Naples once it had been taken. The members were France, Spain, and Rome, the two kings having included the pope in hopes of casting a veil of legitimacy over what was in fact a shamelessly cynical land grab. On June 24 the invaders stormed the city of Capua, which was under the command of Don Fadrique’scondottiere Fabrizio Colonna. Capua’s people were subjected to a sacking so savage that it has remained infamous ever since, and Cesare has often been blamed. It is fair to recall, however, that the army that took Capua was commanded not by him but by the French general Bernard Stewart d’Aubigny and that Cesare himself had charge of only some four hundred of d’Aubigny’s thousands of troops.

Fabrizio Colonna fell into the hands of Gian Giordano Orsini, the late Virginio’s son and onetime fellow prisoner, now in the pay of the French. Cesare offered to pay Orsini handsomely if he would either hand Colonna over or do away with him. It is to Orsini’s credit that he permitted Fabrizio to buy his freedom and make his escape; it seems likely that he was motivated less by any wish to save a Colonna than by dislike of his own ally Cesare and the chance to turn a quick profit. Fabrizio, no doubt astounded by his good fortune, fled south to join his cousin Prospero, in charge of defending the city of Naples.

Don Fadrique, meanwhile, was repeating the mistakes his brother Alfonso II had made in facing the invasion of Charles VIII almost a decade earlier: he was making a stand in scattered stone fortresses rendered obsolete by the invaders’ new artillery. The fate of Capua having showed that he, his tactics, and his kingdom were all doomed, Fadrique sent emissaries to the French in hopes of obtaining tolerable terms. The king and d’Aubigny were prepared to be generous. In return for his abdication, Fadrique was offered a comfortable retirement as duke of Anjou in France. He accepted on August 1 and two days later sailed from Naples to the island of Ischia, from which he was taken to Anjou, where he would live undisturbed for the three final years of his life. His son and heir, named Ferrante after the grandfather who had ruled Naples through three and a half turbulent decades, fell into the hands of the Spanish, now in possession of the southern half of the kingdom. Regarded as a rival claimant to the Neapolitan crown, he would be held a prisoner for fifty-four years, one of history’s numberless forgotten victims.

With Il Regno now broken into halves and occupied by the troops of France and Spain, the Borgias were once again free to look to their own interests, Lucrezia’s marriage included. At this time as in most periods of her life, Lucrezia remains a distant and somewhat enigmatic figure. There is essentially no evidence of what she was thinking as her life entered another time of radical transformation, but it is safe to conclude that she had no objection to the proposed union. Whenever the negotiations seemed in danger of breaking down (usually because of Duke Ercole’s escalating demands), Lucrezia intervened to help smooth things over and persuade Alexander not to give up. She had obvious reasons to be attracted to a new life in the north—the prospect, which would have appealed to almost any lively young woman in a world in which all power was in the hands of men, of becoming the consort of a powerful duke and the mistress of a rich and beautiful city. It is impossible not to wonder if she also welcomed this way of escaping from the intrigues of her brother and the pope.

We would have to conclude, if the most vicious gossip were to be believed, that this was the point in her life when Lucrezia’s conduct was sinking to the lowest depths of degradation. According to one famous story, she participated in a Vatican party to which Pope Alexander invited fifty prostitutes who stripped naked and entertained their hosts with lewd gymnastics involving chestnuts, all of this followed by a rollicking orgy. According to another, she and the pope amused themselves one evening by laughingly watching from a Vatican balcony as mares were led into St. Peter’s Square for the purpose of being mounted by a brace of excited stallions.

Some of the stories did not find their way into print (and may not have existed) until Alexander, Cesare, and Lucrezia herself were all dead. Some, however, were in circulation not only during her lifetime but while Alexander was negotiating with Ferrara’s duke. They were retailed when not originated by the Borgias’ political enemies, among whom were some of the most influential men of the time, and they spread to every city in Italy. Even when the things being said did not provoke horror or disgust, as the ones alleging incest inevitably did, they raised questions about whether Lucrezia was better than a common whore. Duke Ercole found them troubling, understandably. But he had Lucrezia under close and sustained scrutiny and was receiving regular reports on her from his agents in Rome. That he ultimately not only assented to the marriage but bullied his son into it is rather persuasive evidence that his mind had been put at rest by what he learned.

Which is hardly surprising. Believing the stories required believing other things as well. It required believing that Pope Alexander would participate in the corruption of a young woman to whom he had become little less than a father and whom he loved as a daughter. This is not impossible, of course. But neither is it consistent with what we know—what we actually know—about Rodrigo Borgia the man.

Foremost among Duke Ercole’s agents in Rome was Gian Luca Castellini da Pontremoli, long one of his principal counselors, by 1501 an old and intimate friend. At a point when the negotiation of a marriage contract was nearly complete, Castellini advised Ercole that Lucrezia “is of an incontestable beauty and her manners add to her charm. In a word, she seems so gifted that we cannot and should not suspect her of unseemly behavior but presume, believe and hope that she will always behave well.… Your Highness and Lord Don Alfonso will be well satisfied because, quite apart from her perfect grace in all things, her modesty, affability and propriety, she is a Catholic and shows that she fears God.” Castellini could have had no reason to mislead the duke and would have put much at risk by doing so. And he was in Rome, where he would have had little difficulty in learning the truth if Lucrezia were merely pretending to be modest, affable, and proper et cetera and the rumors about her had a basis in fact.

On August 6 a contract was signed at the Vatican. Its terms, when they became known, raised eyebrows across Italy and sparked indignation in the streets and palaces of Rome. Lucrezia’s dowry, greater than the one paid by the House of Sforza to marry one of its daughters to a Holy Roman emperor, included a round one hundred thousand gold ducats; an additional fortune in jewels; a sharp and perpetual reduction in the annual tribute that the duchy of Ferrara owed the papacy as a vassal state; the towns of Cento and Pieve (both of them actually the property of the archdiocese of Bologna, whose prelate was not consulted); and a number of valuable ecclesiastical benefices. Duke Ercole’s patience and cunning, the discipline with which he had maintained an air of indifference as to whether a wedding took place or not, had paid rich dividends. It had driven the pope, urged on by Cesare and encouraged by Lucrezia, to increase what he was offering and increase it again until finally more was on the table than the proudest duke in Europe would have been able to refuse, especially now that the prospective bride had been examined and not found wanting.

The invasion of Naples, meanwhile, was turning out to have been a costly affair for the Colonna and their junior partners the Savelli. Both clans, traditionally affiliated with the House of Aragon, had signed on to fight for Don Fadrique, and both had seen one after another of their estates and strongholds fall to Louis XII’s army as it plundered its way southward. When Fadrique departed for France, he left behind his generals Fabrizio and Prospero Colonna, who thus found themselves unemployed and vulnerable. Fearing the French, they moved south until they were in territory that now belonged to Spain. There they offered their services to Gonsalvo, Ferdinand and Isabella’s newly appointed viceroy, who promptly hired them. Their kinsmen up in the Papal States, meanwhile, were left to fend for themselves. Alexander reaped the benefits, sending units of the papal army to probe the Colonna defenses and seize whatever they could. By contrast the Orsini, having given good service both to Cesare in the Romagna and to Louis XII during the descent upon Naples, ascended to new heights of wealth, power, and prestige. A move against them was out of the question, especially as they continued to have France as an employer and patron.

On September 17, upon returning to Rome from a visit to the south during which he had personally seen to the garrisoning and structural reinforcement of newly captured strongholds, Alexander issued a pair of breathtakingly ambitious bulls. The Colonna and Savelli were declared enemies of the Holy See and excommunicated, and the properties of the Savelli were given to the condottieri Paolo and Giulio Orsini in unavoidable—if regrettable, from the perspective of the Borgias—recognition of their contributions to the recent campaigns and their growing importance. The lands and castles of the Colonna were combined with the estates that had been “sold” to Lucrezia after being taken from the Gaetani in 1500 and that she now relinquished, having no need, as a future duchess of Ferrara, for papal territory. The districts thus made available became the basis for a papal revival of two ancient dukedoms. Lucrezia’s son Rodrigo, not yet two, was made duke of Sermoneta. A mysterious little character who had been christened Giovanni Borgia but would be known ever after as the Infant of Rome became duke of Nepi. Perhaps three years old at the time of his elevation to the highest noble rank, recently legitimatized by papal decree, this child was variously rumored to be Alexander’s, or Lucrezia’s, or Alexander and Lucrezia’s, even Alexander and Lucrezia and Cesare’s. It is not absolutely impossible that he was the illegitimate child that Lucrezia was rumored to have given birth to after the end of her marriage to Giovanni Sforza. His origins have never been uncovered, but the most reasonable guess is that he was a bastard of Cesare’s by a woman whose name is lost to history.

With the bestowal of grand titles and vast holdings on a pair of Borgia infants, one of them of distinctly dubious parentage, Alexander carried nepotism to an extreme that few of his predecessors had dared to approach. In doing so he made it at last impossible for anyone to believe, or to credibly argue, that his real purpose in conferring so much wealth and so many lofty positions on members of his family was to protect the interests of the Church. If that claim had always been questionable, now it was simply laughable. The situation that the pope had created was without precedent: almost the whole of the Papal States had been made the hereditary property of his relatives. It was not defensible, and inevitably it aroused widespread resentment.

Lucrezia’s wedding became the event of the year—of the century, at least as far as Italy was concerned. And again everything was at the expense of the Church. The preparations consumed the attention of the Borgias and everyone closely connected with them throughout midwinter 1501–1502. Alexander, who continued to enjoy robust good health as he entered his seventies—“nothing worries him, he seems to grow younger every day,” Venice’s ambassador reported in an almost complaining tone—continued no less than in his youth to revel in magnificent display. He knew that the people of Rome would judge him by the magnificence with which he marked this grand occasion, and so he poured out the contents of the papal treasury with almost mad abandon, spending even more freely on preparations for the wedding than he had in preparing for Cesare’s visit to France in 1498. Ercole d’Este, having won a jackpot of a wedding settlement, felt free to match the pope’s outlays ducat for ducat, so that the months preceding Lucrezia’s return to married life became an exercise in extravagance on a scale no Roman then living had ever witnessed. A single piece of jewelry that Ercole sent to his future daughter-in-law was said to have a value of seventy thousand ducats.

The party sent from Ferrara to claim the bride and escort her to her husband and new home arrived in Rome on December 23. It included some fifteen hundred persons, many of them high nobles and churchmen and other notables, and was headed by the bridegroom’s three younger brothers, one of whom, the cleric Ippolito, had been appointed to the College of Cardinals in 1493 in spite of being only fourteen years old. On hand to receive it were all the nobles and officials of the city and nineteen cardinals, each accompanied by two hundred horsemen. Cesare’s personal entourage included scores of Roman nobles and four thousand mounted troops, all wearing his red and yellow livery, and the stallion he rode was adorned with jewels and precious metals. The welcoming ceremony went on through hours of orations, with the pope not participating but looking on contentedly from the upper reaches of the Vatican.

There followed, after a week during which the whole capital was given over to an unending round of games, tournaments, sporting events, theatrical performances, and other entertainments, a proxy wedding presided over by thirteen cardinals. Another carnival-like week passed before, on January 6, Lucrezia at last bade the pope farewell and rode out of Rome at the center of a retinue of hundreds of sundry dignitaries and a guard of six hundred uniformed horsemen. Her trousseau—trunk after trunk filled with gowns made of the costliest materials to be found in Italy, plus jewels and gold and silver and fine linen and works of art—was strapped to the backs of 150 mules.

Her departure was a true goodbye, a real change of life. Lucrezia and Alexander would never meet again. Nor would Lucrezia ever again see her little son Rodrigo, who in keeping with custom was not permitted to join his mother as she entered a new marriage. He remained behind, like the Infant of Rome now a permanent member of the papal household.

Lucrezia was on the road for just a day short of four weeks, making formal visits to all the places of note along the way. At every stop, local lords and ladies eager to curry favor spent more than they could afford on new rounds of entertainment and display. It was exhausting, and disagreeable in other ways as well; forced jollity and manufactured displays of affection were required of everyone involved, and of Lucrezia most particularly, everywhere she went. One of the stops had deeply unpleasant associations: Pesaro, where Lucrezia had once spent tedious months as the wife of Giovanni Sforza. Bologna too must have been excruciating; there the bride was received by Ginevra Bentivoglio, who in addition to being wife of the city’s lord was Giovanni Sforza’s aunt and the grandmother of Astorre Manfredi, now a prisoner in Rome.

Arrival in Ferrara brought Lucrezia’s first exposure to Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, who had been placed in charge of hospitality by her father Duke Ercole. Lucrezia of course knew that Isabella had opposed the marriage from the beginning and that she remained deeply suspicious of her and doubtful of her moral character. Making things still worse was Isabella’s status as a proud and famous beauty, accustomed to being the center of attention at her father’s court and her husband’s at Mantua and Modena. She saw Lucrezia as a rival, a threat to her preeminence. The effusions of false joy and devotion at this first encounter must have been wonderful to behold.

At last Lucrezia came face-to-face with her husband, the stolid Alfonso, who is not likely to have troubled himself to bring whatever charm he was capable of mustering to bear upon his new mate. She, in consequence, is not likely to have been overly delighted by what she first saw of him. The marriage was consummated with dispatch all the same, and the festivities went on and on until Duke Ercole was hinting sourly and in increasingly loud tones that perhaps it was time for people to be returning to their own homes. Gradually Ferrara returned to normal. It remained for the truth about Lucrezia’s character to be revealed by the test that now lay before her: the need to go on with life under the cold gaze of a hardheaded father-in-law, a distinctly uninfatuated husband, a hostile sister-in-law, and platoons of other in-laws and courtiers all looking for reasons to find fault.

An uneasy quiet prevailed across Italy through the first four months of Lucrezia’s new life. There was no war anywhere, aside from the minor clashes that broke out from time to time as Florence continued its harassment of Pisa. Signs of impending trouble, however, were not hard to find. Predictably, the division of Naples between France and Spain had proved satisfactory to neither party, leading almost immediately to skirmishes along the frontier separating the kingdom’s two halves and making a showdown seem not only inevitable but likely to occur soon. In Rome, Cesare was preparing to set forth on a third impresa. His prospects could hardly have been more favorable. He could depend upon France and Spain to be tolerant if not actively supportive; neither would want to alienate him or the pope with a new war for Naples looming. Florence could put no obstacles in his path; what remained of its strength was being drained away by the struggle to retake Pisa. Venice too was otherwise engaged (with the Turks, as usual), Ferrara was now more or less an ally thanks to Lucrezia’s marriage, and the Romagna was his to command. The Colonna had been weakened to the point of irrelevance, and though the Orsini remained strong, Cesare had co-opted them by signing their leading men to condotta.

Cesare, who with one more successful campaign could make himself supreme in north-central Italy, was almost ready to move. By letting no one know what he intended to do, where he was going to take his army once it was on the march, he spread anxiety from the canals of Venice to the hills of Tuscany. He already had troops stationed at far-flung strategic points. Some were at Cesena, in the hills bordering the far eastern edge of the Lombard Plain, under the toughest of his Spanish lieutenants, Ramiro de Lorqua. Michelotto Corella, almost certainly guilty of strangling the duke of Bisceglie on Cesare’s behalf, was in the Romagna recruiting and training a militia. Other troops waited on the Romagna-Tuscany frontier under Vitellozzo Vitelli and his equally thuggish crony Gian Paolo Baglioni of Perugia. If any of them knew what Cesare was planning, they too were keeping silent.

The fates, however, proved as capricious as ever and plucked the initiative out of Cesare’s hands. On June 4 the Tuscan city of Arezzo, fed up with the taxes imposed by Florence to finance its war on Pisa, suddenly rebelled. It expelled its Florentine governors and called for a restoration of the Medici. Cesare’s man Vitelli, presumably acting without his knowledge, immediately moved in, and he and his 3,500 soldiers were welcomed as liberators by the Arezzans. Vitelli and Baglioni also took possession of the fertile Chiana valley, west of Arezzo and even closer to Florence. All this was a mortal challenge to the Florentines, a flagrant occupation of their home territory. It was made all the more threatening by the appearance, with Vitelli and Baglioni, of the hapless Piero de’ Medici, perpetually in search of an opportunity to become master of Florence once again. These developments immediately brought to the fore the question of where the real power now resided in central Italy. In doing so they left the king of France with no choice but to become involved.

Vitelli, so consumed by hatred of the Florentines as to be nearly incapable of behaving responsibly, was the worst possible man to be in the middle of this situation. One historian has suggested that, being no friend of the Borgias in spite of being in Cesare’s pay, he had encouraged the Arezzans to rebel, hoping to put the blame on Cesare and thereby turn the French against him. An alternative hypothesis is that Cesare, upon learning of the rebellion, ordered Vitelli to occupy Arezzo in order to gauge just how determined the French king was to protect Florence. It quickly became clear that he was very determined indeed: he sent unequivocal orders for Vitelli and Baglioni to pull out of Arezzo immediately. When the two of them ignored this edict, Cesare as their employer was put in a severely awkward position. He decided not to be deflected, however, from the execution of his own plans.

The Arezzo crisis accelerated everything. Just two days after the start of the rebellion two corpses, their hands and feet bound, were found in the Tiber River. One was the body of Astorre Manfredi, late lord of Faenza, the other of the illegitimate half-brother who had been his comrade in arms through the long winter when Cesare had them and their city under siege. Both youths, following their negotiated surrender, had become members of Cesare’s entourage, then prisoners in the Castel Sant’Angelo. And now they were dead. No one but Cesare could have been responsible. His motive is not hard to guess: to remove a popular young leader in support of whom the people of Faenza might themselves have rebelled. Four days after the discovery of the bodies, having cleared the decks, Cesare was on the move. He led his army out of Rome and headed north and east. As before, no one appeared to have any idea of where he was going or what he intended to do.

Word spread that his objective was Camerino, a city-state of some thirty thousand inhabitants ninety miles north of Rome. It was in a sense an improbable target. Being well to the south of Cesare’s Romagna conquests, it could never be easily integrated into the state he was assembling. But it was also a rich little city ruled by a particularly unpopular tyrant. The seventy-year-old Giulio Cesare Varano, who as a young man had seized power by murdering his brother (fratricide having been an almost regular occurrence among the Varani from early in the thirteenth century), had been declared an outlaw for failing to pay the annual tribute owed to the Vatican. He was also, along with his four arrogant sons, hated by his subjects. If brought under attack, the Varani would inspire none of the loyalty that had made it so difficult to take Faenza from the Manfredi.

All such speculation turned out to be irrelevant when, in a lightning stroke that stunned the whole of northern Italy, Cesare abruptly changed direction and, moving his army through sixty miles of rugged mountain country in an astonishing forty-eight hours, fell not upon Camerino but upon the far greater prize of Urbino fifty miles to its north. Urbino was then what it remains today: one of the jewels of northwestern Italy. A beautiful little city on a high hill, it was towered over by the magnificent palace made possible by the colossal earnings of the duke who built it, Federico da Montefeltro, second only to Francesco Sforza of Milan among the great condottieri of the fifteenth century. His son and successor, the same Guidobaldo da Montefeltro who had been Juan Borgia’s co-commander in the failed attack on the Orsini with which Alexander VI opened his reign, was urged by the townsfolk to organize a defense as soon as they understood that Cesare’s army was coming down on them.

The refined Guidobaldo, more scholar than soldier, saw no point in doing anything of the kind. He sensibly concluded that the likely result of resistance would be the destruction of everything his father had built and catastrophe for Urbino’s people. He therefore departed with his wife Elisabetta, who as a Gonzaga of Mantua was now related by marriage to Lucrezia Borgia and therefore to Cesare himself. (In an all-too-typical example of the arcane ways in which all the leading families of Italy had come to be interconnected, Lucrezia’s third marriage had made Cesare the brother of the bride of Elisabetta’s brother Francesco Gonzaga’s wife’s brother Alfonso d’Este. Diagrams are required to make such things understandable.)

When Cesare reached Urbino on June 21, he met with no resistance and was able to take possession of the city without a blow being struck or a drop of blood shed. He found the ducal palace filled with treasures of every description, everything the Montefeltri family had accumulated over the generations, the magnificent library that Duke Federico had devoted much of his life to assembling included. He ordered all of it packed up for transfer to Cesena, now a base of Borgia operations in the north and under the command of the fierce and faithful Lorqua.

The conquest of Urbino was, depending on one’s point of view, either a stroke of tactical brilliance or the cynical betrayal of a blameless duke. Possibly it was both, but it is less than certain that Guidobaldo was entirely innocent. Cesare, who rarely troubled to explain himself, chose to do so in this case, claiming that he had decided to move against Urbino only after learning that Guidobaldo was secretly sending assistance to the outlawed Giulio Cesare Varano in Camerino. This is not necessarily untrue. It would have been prudent of Guidobaldo to surmise that if Camerino were allowed to fall into Cesare’s hands, Urbino would become a convenient and logical next target. Nor would he have been wrong in supposing that, by helping Varano and his sons to hold off Cesare at Camerino, he might save Urbino from attack. What mattered, however, was Cesare’s capture of an extraordinary prize at almost no cost. This enhanced his stature as the most dangerous man in Italy after Louis XII.

Two questions were on every mind. What was Cesare going to do next, and what was his ultimate objective? When he sent word to Florence that he had important matters to discuss, the city’s signoria hastened to respond. They assigned one of the republic’s leading diplomats, Bishop Francesco Soderini, to hurry to Urbino. There he was to do everything possible to keep Cesare out of Tuscany and get Vitelli and Baglioni out of Arezzo and the Val di Chiana.

Soderini was a capable man, experienced, sophisticated, and clever. He was also a member of one of Florence’s most distinguished families; in this same year, his brother Piero would be appointed to the new and immensely prestigious position of gonfalonier for life. It was unthinkable to send such a high dignitary on such a sensitive mission without a private secretary, and a worthy one at that. So when the bishop rode out of Florence en route to Urbino, at his side was a rising young diplomat and civil servant named Niccolò Machiavelli.

Background
 
 THE ANGEL’S CASTLE

ONE THING AT LEAST REMAINED CONSTANT THROUGH ALL THE transformations the city of Rome underwent during the thousand years preceding the arrival of the Borgias. The massive bulk of the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Castle of the Holy Angel, continued to loom over the Tiber River where it passes closest to the Vatican. The Castel was already hundreds of years old when the Roman Empire fell. It was approaching its seven-hundredth birthday when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman emperor, and it would be midway through its second millennium when work began on the great basilica that dominates St. Peter’s Square today.

The Borgias, once they were on the scene, soon learned what everyone learned who was involved in the politics of Rome: that the Castel was the city’s sole impregnable fortress, the place that no ruler seeking to be safe could afford to be without.

There is irony in this. When built, the Castel was not intended for any military purpose—or even for the use of living human beings. It was a mausoleum, a crypt, the creation of the Emperor Hadrian, the second-century Spaniard who also built the famous wall across the north of Britain. When he came to the throne in 117 AD, Rome already had a grand mausoleum for the ashes of deceased emperors and their families, a massive affair built by Augustus in 28 BC. But its last available niche had been filled with the remains of the Emperor Nerva in 98 AD. Nerva’s successor and Hadrian’s immediate predecessor, Trajan, finessed the problem by arranging to have himself interred beneath the immense column that bears his name and has been one of Rome’s landmarks ever since. Hadrian, however, found this an unsatisfactory expedient. In the early 130s he ordered work begun on a structure so ambitious that it would not be completed in his lifetime. His contemporaries, finding nothing to compare it with even in the imperial capital, described it in terms that evoked the gigantic monuments of ancient Egypt.

Hadrian’s Tomb, as it was called almost from the start, was an enormous squat cylinder resting on an even bigger boxlike base of four equal sides, all of it sheathed in fine Parian marble and faced with Ionic and Corinthian colonnades. The outer wall of the upper cylinder provided the base for a ring of statues that encircled a garden-in-the-sky, and at the elevated center of this garden, towering over the entire neighborhood, was a kind of cupola sheltering an almost preposterously outsize statue of Hadrian, the head of which can be seen today in one of Rome’s museums. The burial chamber was at the center of the basement level. Persons granted admission to the interior could ascend to the garden through a spiral passageway that was eleven feet wide with a thirty-foot ceiling.

Hadrian, one of the empire’s more capable rulers, was not the first person to be buried in his tomb. He was preceded in death by his adopted son and intended successor, just as two centuries before Augustus had lost a stepson and two grandsons before expiring himself. Hadrian was joined in due course by generations of later emperors, including such famous figures as Marcus Aurelius, his son Commodus, and Septimus Severus. The last burial was that of the Emperor Caracalla, assassinated in 217, after which the structure was incorporated into a new city wall and stood dormant until, two centuries later, Rome came under threat from Germanic invaders. At that point the city’s desperate defenders awoke to the fact that Hadrian’s Tomb was by far the most formidable stronghold available to them. Its conversion to military use probably occurred early in the fifth century, during the dismal years when the Emperor Honorius presided over the accelerating disintegration of the empire. Though it gradually lost much of its original grandeur—in 537 Hadrian’s magnificent statues were hurled down on attacking Ostrogoths—unlike the Tomb of Augustus it was never reduced to a heap of crumbling ruins.

The year 530 was memorable for a terrible Tiber flood, a consequent outbreak of plague, and a resulting change of name for the tomb. This happened because Pope Gregory the Great, in leading a procession of penitents across the bridge that Hadrian had constructed adjacent to his mausoleum, happened to look up and saw the majestic figure of Saint Michael the Archangel returning to its sheath a bloody sword. This was a sign, as Gregory explained to the faithful, that the epidemic was at an end. It did abate in any case, and Hadrian’s Tomb became the Castel Sant’Angelo.

Visitors from the spirit world notwithstanding, the Castel became the setting for nightmarish dramas. The imprisonment, torture, and murder of successive popes that punctuated the so-called pornocracy of the tenth century all took place in the Castel, which subsequently was fought over by the baronial clans and by popes and antipopes. The Colonna had possession for a time, but lost it in a nasty little war that ended with their banishment from Rome. A century and a half later, in order to save it from demolition, the pope of the time had to cede it to the Orsini. It was an Orsini pope, Nicholas III, who in 1277 built a fortified passageway to the Castel as a means of escape from the Vatican. By the early fifteenth century the Castel was permanently in the custody of the Church, and a stout and ugly square tower had been installed atop the cylinder, high up where Hadrian’s garden had once been. The marble facade had been stripped away for use in paving the streets.

The Castel had become the key to Rome, or at least to avoiding expulsion. Like the Tower of London in distant England it served a multitude of purposes: stronghold, part-time residence for rulers, prison, symbol of power, refuge in time of danger. Alexander invested heavily in strengthening it and in making it a comfortable retreat.

He also fortified the Passetto di Borgo, the passageway connecting the Vatican to the Castel. It would be the saving of a number of his relatives, at least for a while.