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“Splendid.”
“Magnificent.”
These are the first two adjectives employed by Niccolò Machiavelli in the description of Cesare Borgia that he writes as the two are getting to know each other in Urbino in the hair-raising summer of 1502.
This lord is truly splendid and magnificent, he reports to his masters in Florence. In the pursuit of glory and territory he is unceasing and knows neither danger nor fatigue.
Such words are remarkable, coming as they do from Machiavelli of all people. Few men in history have been less easy to impress. He will be famous forever for the wryness of his observations, the cool detachment with which he arrives at his sometimes stunning insights, and above all the fathomless cynicism that pervades his classic work The Prince. His writings drip with contempt for some of the greatest figures of his day. To see him lavishing praise on someone he has just met, an adversary five years his junior, is not only unexpected but little short of astonishing.
Despite all the reasons he has to despise Cesare and depict him in the ugliest possible terms—he is, after all, a mortal danger to the Republic of Florence—Machiavelli’s description reads like a hymn of praise, a rapture, almost a love song. Cesare is loved by his soldiers, he writes. Cesare is victorious and formidable, and enjoys constant good fortune. As the words pile up, one begins to wonder if Machiavelli has lost the ability to think critically, if he is in the grip of something akin to infatuation. Once again, as with Cesare’s domination of Pope Alexander, we catch a reflection of the power, the raw charisma, of his personality. Of the almost preternaturally magnetic force felt by almost everyone who ever came near him, and of the physical appeal that came with being what he was repeatedly called: “the handsomest man of his time.” The historian Pandolfo Collenuccio wrote of the grown-up Cesare in 1500 that he was “accounted valiant, joyous, and open-handed, and it is believed that he holds honest men in high esteem.” In a flash of almost Machiavellian insight, Collenuccio further described Cesare as “filled with aspiration” and having “a longing for greatness and renown.”
Machiavelli himself looked deeper and saw more. He decided that Cesare, more than anyone else then living, had the vision, the boldness, and the strength of character needed to rescue Italy from the divisions that had made it so vulnerable to invaders.
In company with Francesco Soderini, Machiavelli had arrived in Urbino around sundown on June 24 at the end of a hard ride over the Apennines. The two were given accommodations in the city’s episcopal palace, Soderini being a bishop, and shortly before midnight were taken to see Cesare. Rarely are historians given a greater gift than this: that as acute an observer as has ever lived should visit and report upon one of the most strikingly memorable figures of the Renaissance. And that they should continue to meet as Cesare’s story unfolds, the result being a kind of three-dimensional portrait extended, and evolving, over time.
It is irresistibly fascinating, the image of these two young men, each destined in his own way and on his own schedule for failure and eternal fame, facing each other for the first time. They have been brought together not just by great events but by need. Cesare needing Florence—needing something from Florence, certainly, in spite of the city’s weakness and the conquests that have made him so feared. Machiavelli and the bishop, in their turn, needing something from Cesare—needing above all to find some way of keeping him as far from Florence as possible. Reduced to a single word, that is their mission: to keep Cesare away.
They meet in one of the numerous vast and high-ceilinged chambers of Urbino’s glorious ducal palace, still unfinished in 1502 but already comprising more than 250 rooms. On one side, alone behind an expanse of polished tabletop, sits Cesare, master of the situation no less than of the sleeping city of Urbino. Cesare the crafty, the self-dramatizing, playing his little trick of meeting with callers in the middle of the night, a single burning candle placed behind him so that he can see the faces of his visitors while his own remains in shadow. Dressed as always in a simple black tunic that sets off his ivory skin and is adorned with nothing except the emblem of the Order of St. Michel that the king of France first placed around his neck. Cesare the conqueror. Valentino.
Opposite, alongside the bishop he serves, sits Machiavelli the mere secretary, the civil servant, the promising junior diplomat. He is nobody’s idea of handsome, with his close-set eyes in a long ovoid face that narrows down to a sharp chin. If there is not much strength in that face, there is mischief in the eyes, the trace of a smile flickering about the thin lips. Cesare will learn to enjoy Machiavelli’s company, and it is not hard to see why. In addition to their shared fascination with power—Cesare the practitioner, Machiavelli one of the most original students the subject has ever had—they have in common a lively wit and a kind of intelligence that can be hard and cold as ice. If Machiavelli is perhaps not capable of rising to Cesare’s level of ruthlessness—life will give him no opportunity to find out—he is certainly capable of appreciating Cesare’s attainments in that regard. They have been brought together by matters vital to both of them, under circumstances that make it impossible for either to be entirely forthright. Each has to look for hidden meanings in whatever the other says. Something clicks between them all the same. They are more than shrewd enough, both of them, to take each other’s measure quickly, and to see how well they are matched.
At this first meeting, which continues into the small hours of a new day, Cesare and his visitors spar cordially, engaging in oblique attempted bluffs. Cesare complains, accurately enough, that Florence has failed to carry out the terms of the previous year’s agreement, which was, boiled down to its implicit essence, a promise to pay him not to attack. Soderini counters by suggesting, not implausibly though the truth of the matter cannot be known to him and remains unknown to the present day, that Cesare colluded in the seizure of Arezzo and the Val de Chiana by Vitellozzo Vitelli and Gian Paolo Baglioni. The two try to trump each other in laying claim to the support of Louis XII, whom they know to be quite powerful enough to obliterate not only Florence and the Borgias but their enemies and friends as well.
The king of France, as it happens, is a subject of which Cesare and Machiavelli share exceptional personal knowledge. Both have spent long anxious months at Louis XII’s court. Both went there—at separate times—in search of favors. And both, after much frustration, were ultimately successful: Cesare in obtaining a dukedom, a bride, and adoption as one of the king’s favorites, Machiavelli in winning a promise of protection for Florence. What Cesare now hints—that Louis will raise no objection if he simply seizes Florence and installs there a government that can be depended upon to do his bidding—would have seemed plausible to many listeners. It may even have frightened Soderini. Machiavelli, however, knows better and is less impressed than amused. He knows that Louis, in addition to being in real need of Borgia support, is also seriously short of money, is going to need Florence’s banks, and can have no interest in allowing Cesare to take control of the Florentine territories through which French troops will soon have to pass on their way to Naples.
Still, not even Machiavelli can find anything amusing about the note on which Cesare ends the meeting. He is not, he declares, going to put up with procrastination or prevarication. Florence has to decide: it is his friend or his enemy, and there is no middle ground. If it chooses to be his friend, it has nothing to fear; it possesses nothing that he wants. If the signoria is worried about a possible restoration of the Medici, nothing could be more obvious than that Cesare is in the business of removing, not installing, tyrants. If on the other hand Florence rejects his friendship, he will have no choice but to respond as he thinks best. Thus does the threat of invasion hang in the night air as Cesare dismisses his visitors, advising them to stand by for further talk on the morrow.
The next morning, finding themselves unsummoned, Soderini and Machiavelli left their quarters and went exploring, no doubt doing their best to imitate casual sightseers while in fact on the hunt for information. Even as sons of Florence, that city of splendor, they must have been impressed by what the Montefeltri family had done with the mountaintop redoubt of Urbino. At a time when a common laborer could expect to earn perhaps fifteen ducats in a year, when 2,500 ducats was sufficient to set up an aristocratic family in a respectable home, Federico da Montefeltro had spent two hundred thousand on the expansion and perfection of his ancestral base. He had spent scores more thousands on acquiring exquisite works of art and on assembling a collection of manuscripts said to surpass the library of Oxford University. And now palace and library alike were being stripped bare, paintings and statues and all the rest being loaded onto carts to be hauled a hundred miles north to Cesare’s rocca at Cesena.
At some point in their tour, presumably to their surprise and undoubtedly to their delight, the two Florentines came upon, or found themselves intercepted by, Paolo Orsini and his cousin Giulio. This pair, well known as soldiers and leading members of their clan, had come to Urbino with Cesare’s army as two of his condottieri. Their encounter with Soderini and Machiavelli may have been awkward, at least at first. Like almost all members of their family, Paolo and Giulio were Medici partisans and enemies of Florence’s current regime. But that morning in Urbino, Soderini and Machiavelli had far less interest in ancient blood feuds than in trying to learn whatever they could, especially about what Cesare was thinking and what he intended to do. And so they gave themselves over to a friendly chat. The Orsini did likewise, and the talk turned inexorably to what had been discussed in Cesare’s chamber the night before: the question of how Louis of France was likely to react if Cesare moved against Florence. The Orsini spoke carefully, obliquely. Acknowledging that the king was unlikely ever to explicitly withdraw his promise to protect Florence—by doing so he would make himself look dishonorable and weak—they nevertheless gave the visitors to understand that Louis was willing to advance southward out of Milan slowly enough to give Cesare time to do as he wished without interference. Preparations for an offensive against Florence, they suggested, were already under way. They spoke of how fast Cesare was capable of moving—meaning how little time he would need.
Much of this was the opposite of the truth. Machiavelli was right in surmising that Louis would never let Cesare, or anyone else, seize control of Florence and Tuscany. On that very morning, though no one in Urbino had any way of knowing it, part of the king’s army was departing Milan with two related assignments: to see to it that Florence was left alone, and to force Vitelli and Baglioni out of Tuscany. Ignorant though he was of these developments, Machiavelli must have seen through the Orsinis’ pose. He knew Paolo’s reputation—knew that, though capable of talking tough, he was an unstable character, so unsteady under pressure that his own troops called him “Madonna” Orsini and not because of any maternal concern for their well-being. And that Giulio, though a more impressive fighting man than his cousin—the Borgias would learn to their cost just how relentless a foe he could be—had a reputation for deviousness second only to that of his brother, the fork-tongued Cardinal Giovanni Battista Orsini. Machiavelli and the bishop would have suspected from the start that this encounter was no accident, and that Cesare had instructed the cousins in what to say in order to frighten the signori of Florence and prompt them to come to terms.
That night, hours after sundown, Soderini and Machiavelli were escorted back to the ducal palace to meet again with Cesare. This eccentric scheduling, if partly tactical on Cesare’s part, was also a reflection of his youth: he still had a young man’s inclination, which he indulged with an insouciance that could infuriate even the pope, to stay up all night and sleep the morning away. This time, his visitors soon saw, there were to be no more amusing preliminaries, no verbal sparring, no subtleties to be interpreted at leisure. Cesare began where he had ended the night before, with an ultimatum. Florence had to decide whether it was with him or against him. And now there was a deadline: he would give the signoria four days to reach its decision and not an hour more. If he had received no answer after four days, Cesare would, as he vaguely but ominously put it, act in accord with his own interests. His insistence that everything be settled quickly seemed to Machiavelli a confirmation of his suspicions. The duke, he felt sure, hoped to be able to present Louis of France with a fait accompli in which king, republic, and Borgias were all allies but Florence was in a distinctly submissive role.
Soderini and Machiavelli spent the rest of the night drafting a report that, immediately upon completion, they handed to a mounted courier for delivery to Florence with all possible speed. A few hours later, after snatching a bit of sleep, Machiavelli too set out on the seventy-mile ride home. He and the bishop had agreed that one of them had better return home to explain some of the subtleties barely touched on in their report. Soderini, as senior member of the delegation, would remain in Urbino, doing what he could to keep Cesare’s impatience under control while being careful to promise him nothing.
Ironically, the whole drama came to nothing. The Florentine authorities, benefiting from Machiavelli’s account of what he had witnessed in Urbino and his interpretation of the situation, found excuses to delay their response. They sent word back to Cesare that, eager though they were to cooperate, it seemed advisable to commit to nothing until the pope and King Louis had been consulted. This was so unanswerable, so impossible to object to, that it sent Cesare into a white-hot rage and Soderini racing out of Urbino in fear for his life. When French couriers reached Cesare with orders not to disturb Florence but instead to dislodge Vitelli and Baglioni from Arezzo, the game was up, his bluff called.
Unwilling to settle for doing nothing with the army he had mustered at such cost, Cesare sent a body of troops hurrying south in an attack on Camerino. There, at least, things went well. When the old warlord Giulio Cesare Varano tried to organize a defense, his subjects pushed him aside and insisted on immediate surrender. They opened their gates to the invaders, becoming the latest city to fall into Cesare’s hands without a fight. Compared to Florence and Bologna, however, Camerino was a small prize of little strategic value. Though Varano had been promised his freedom in return for surrender, he was thrown into a cell. He would die there after a few months, and the three of his sons who had been captured with him would then be done away with.
Vitelli and Baglioni, meanwhile, persisted in refusing to pull out of Arezzo and the Val di Chiana. They continued to do so even when a body of Louis XII’s troops arrived on the scene, yielding only—and angrily—when Cesare warned that if they did not withdraw, he would attack their home cities of Città di Castello and Perugia. Quite apart from their wish to hurt Florence, both found this an excruciating reverse. As they saw the situation, they had taken Arezzo and the Val da Chiana fair and square, Florence had proved incapable of taking either place back, and had they been allowed to maintain possession, their domains would have been wonderfully enhanced and their place in the hierarchy of Italian tyrants raised correspondingly. Baglioni, however, knew what it was to lose everything and had no wish to repeat the experience. Early in his bloody career he had been driven out of Perugia by cousins who slaughtered his immediate family and barely missed killing him as well. It was Vitelli who had helped him to retake the city in 1500 and had joined him in butchering as many of the enemy Baglioni, women and children included, as could be stopped from escaping. That had cemented the relationship between the two men, making Baglioni a substitute for Vitelli’s executed brother, but it had put a limit on Baglioni’s appetite for risk. He was ready to go home, and his decision left Vitelli with no choice but to do likewise.
All the tyrants of north Italy were afraid of Cesare at this point, and all were looking for help. The men he had displaced but not captured or killed—Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, for example, and the sole surviving son of Giulio Cesare Varano—had migrated to Louis XII’s court in Milan, the one place they could take their grievances and at least hope to produce a result. They were being joined by men who had not yet lost their places but feared that they soon would: Giovanni Bentivoglio of Bologna, Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua, and others. Louis found himself under a barrage of warnings about the dangers posed by Borgia ambition and the need to understand that Cesare was the enemy even of France. These entreaties were echoed by some of the regulars at the court, most emphatically by Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. He had returned to his old refrain about how Alexander VI had no right to the pontifical throne and removing him would be a blessed act.
Cesare was aware of all this—he had a keen appreciation of the value of information and always spent freely to keep himself current—and he needed no one to tell him how worthless all his conquests would be if Louis turned against him. Early on the morning of July 27, disguised as a knight of the Order of St. John and accompanied by only three companions, he rode out of Urbino with his destination, as usual, unstated. The next day he showed up in Ferrara, where he found an epidemic of some kind ravaging the city and his sister Lucrezia both pregnant and dangerously ill. The two talked all night, using the Valencian dialect that had been the language of their childhood and that prevented eavesdroppers from understanding what they said. The next day, after summoning papal physicians to come and attend to Lucrezia, accompanied now by his brother-in-law Alfonso d’Este, Cesare mounted up again and started for Milan.
We have no certain knowledge of why Alfonso left his bride, expecting his child and so ill that her life was believed to be in danger, in order to join Cesare on the ride from Ferrara to Milan. Obviously he was not restrained from doing so by any great affection for Lucrezia. He and his father the duke probably thought it advisable, with a new war for Naples in the offing, to provide Louis XII with fresh and direct assurances that they remained his faithful friends. It is equally probable that Cesare had urged upon the Este the importance of demonstrating to the king that they and he were united in his support. It would have been natural for him to want to create the impression that Ferrara was now his to command.
On August 5, when Cesare came pounding into Milan and presented himself at an astonished French court, his enemies were appalled to observe the enthusiasm with which Louis received him. The king found it touching, apparently, that the young Valentino had undertaken such an arduous and risky journey in order to see him, and his old affection was immediately rekindled. A retainer of Francesco Gonzaga observed that “His Most Christian Majesty welcomed and embraced [Cesare] with great joy and led him to the castle, where he had him lodged in the chamber nearest him, and he himself ordered the supper, choosing diverse dishes, and that evening three or four times he went to his room dressed in shirt sleeves.… He could not have done more for a son or a brother.” Thus encouraged, Cesare spent long hours in conversation not only with the king but also with his chief minister Cardinal d’Amboise, whose hopes of becoming the next pope provided all the encouragement he needed to stay on the friendliest possible terms with the Borgias and their minions in the College of Cardinals.
Cesare remained at court for almost a month, accomplishing everything he could have hoped when setting out. The extent of his success is evident in the transformation that his time in Milan wrought in his relationship with Francesco Gonzaga, marquess (a noble rank lower only than duke) of the city-state of Mantua and lord of Modena as well. Gonzaga had reacted angrily to Cesare’s unexpected appearance in Milan. He treated him with contempt, hurling insults until Cesare challenged him to a duel. The king intervened, demanding that the two find a way to become friends.
They were helped to do so by Gonzaga’s wife Isabella, the daughter of Duke Ercole of Ferrara who had objected so bitterly to her brother’s marriage to Lucrezia. Like her late sister Beatrice, wife of Ludovico Sforza of Milan, Isabella was more intelligent, more sophisticated, and politically a good deal shrewder than her husband. When, at home in Mantua, she heard about Francesco’s clash with Cesare, she sent a letter of rebuke. “I cannot conceal my fears for your person and state,” she told her husband. “It is generally understood that His Most Christian Majesty has some understanding with Valentino, so I beg you to be careful not to use words which may be repeated to him, because in these days we do not know who is to be trusted. There is a report here—whether it has come from Milan by letter or mouth, I do not know—that Your Excellency has spoken angry words against Valentino before the Most Christian King and the Pope’s servants, and whether this is true or not, they will doubtless reach the ears of Valentino, who, having already shown that he does not scruple to conspire against those of his own blood, will, I am certain, not hesitate to plot against your person.”
In saying that Cesare had conspired against his own blood, she was referring of course to the murder of his brother Juan. About that, as we have seen, she was almost certainly wrong. She was right, however, in warning her husband that if he valued his life, he would change his behavior. No one could yet know, in September 1502, just how right she was, but Francesco was sensible enough to take her advice. Isabella also intervened with Cesare directly, writing to him in fawning terms and sending him a hundred carnival masks—a perfectly chosen gift in light of his predilection for going about masked when in Rome. The rift was healed so completely—clearly neither side wanted further trouble—that before Cesare’s departure a betrothal was arranged between the three-year-old daughter he had never seen and the Gonzagas’ two-year-old son and heir. It is difficult to believe that anyone expected this arrangement ever to lead to an actual marriage, but in the near term there was something in it for everyone. It put Cesare on a newly friendly footing with Mantua, which lay just to the north of Bologna and was closely connected to Ferrara. It spared Louis XII from having to add Mantua to the list of states he was committed to shielding from Cesare.
Isabella was right about something else too. There was indeed “some understanding” with Louis, one that from Cesare’s perspective could hardly have been more welcome. The king, betraying his new ally Giovanni Bentivoglio in much the same way that he had already betrayed the people of Pisa, promised not only not to interfere if Cesare chose to attack Bologna—which helps to explain Cesare’s eagerness for a rapprochement with Bologna’s neighbor, the gratuitously insulting Gonzaga of Mantua—but to continue making troops available for Cesare’s use. He further agreed that Cesare should be free to deal with his own condottieri—Vitelli, Baglioni, and various Orsini—in whatever way he thought best. In return the king required only that Cesare acknowledge the status of Florence as a French protectorate and join his army with France’s when the war with Spain began. On September 2, in bidding the king farewell, Cesare offered profuse thanks and a written pledge that “when the time comes I will present myself to you at the head of ten thousand men.” He then started back to the Romagna. Again he detoured to Ferrara, arriving to discover that Lucrezia had suffered a miscarriage and was now so ill that she was not expected to recover. He helped to hold her down while the physicians summoned from Rome bled her, and witnesses would report that the two days he spent at her side “cheered her greatly.” Though Lucrezia was given the last rites the day after the bleeding, she went on to make a full recovery. She would, however, never see her brother again. That he had twice added a hundred miles to a hard journey at least partly to see his sister—solely for that purpose the second time, so far as we know—shows the strength of the bond between the two.
Cesare established a headquarters at Imola and, employing some of his clergymen relatives as administrators, set about organizing his new duchy of Romagna. In doing so he demonstrated that he had learned from the example of Pope Alexander, who from the reign of Calixtus III had displayed a good understanding of the problems of the Papal States and a keen appreciation of the value of firm and honest administration in maintaining order and creating loyalty. Cesare replaced the capricious and often savagely cruel rule of the likes of Caterina Sforza with something the Romagnese people had not experienced since ancient times: governmental machinery that functioned fairly and efficiently and delivered real justice. One of his first acts in this connection was to dismiss his vicar-general, the Spaniard Ramiro de Lorqua. Lorqua’s hard methods, growing interest in enriching himself, and sneering contempt for the farmers and merchants of the Romagna had made him hated. His demotion to the governorship of Rimini was cheered everywhere except in that suddenly fearful city. Cesare created a new office, presidente, and appointed to it a distinguished jurist and humanist scholar named Antonio di Monte Sansovino, not just personally honest but devoted to rooting out official corruption. The administration that Sansovino put in place marked the opening of a new era for the Romagna. It made Cesare a popular figure, a ruler for whom many of the region’s people would be willing to fight.
The understanding that Cesare had come to with Louis XII in Milan was supposedly secret, but word of it leaked out soon enough. Possibly Pope Alexander let it slip in the course of talking, as he was increasingly inclined to do as he grew older, too much and too freely. He would alternate happy effusions about Cesare’s conquests with complaints about how much he was draining from the papal treasury—no less than a thousand ducats a day at this point. It would not be surprising if he let what he knew of Cesare’s plans slip out in the course of one of his monologues. However it happened, the Orsini learned that Louis had given Cesare license to do with them as he wished. Their compeers Vitelli and Baglioni inferred, sensibly enough, that they too were marked for destruction.
Giovanni Bentivoglio of Bologna could feel a Borgia noose tightening around his neck as well. On September 17 he received orders to come to Rome to answer charges of having failed to fulfill his responsibilities as a papal vicar and, even more ominously, to bring his sons with him. Six days later Louis XII sent an even more shocking instruction: Bentivoglio was to surrender Bologna to the pope. Thoroughly alarmed, Bentivoglio assembled the leading men of the city and invited them to vote on whether he should do as the king demanded. The balloting was to be secret, with each participant putting into a box either a white bean indicating that Bentivoglio should stay or a black bean indicating that he should go. Any doubts about the outcome disappeared when the electors discovered that they had been given white beans only. It was all futile in any case; Bentivoglio obviously was doomed, and just as obviously he was not alone. The threatened lords began to meet and talk, and their discussions turned inevitably into the hatching of plans for striking at Cesare while there was still time. Among the plotters were the leading Orsini, the Bentivoglii, the Baglioni, Pandolfo Petrucci of Siena, Vitellozzo Vitelli, the exiled Guidobaldo of Urbino, and the lords of several smaller states. All were soldiers, many were seasoned killers, and almost all commanded substantial territories and significant numbers of men. Together they were likely to be strong enough to defy the pope, escape the wrath of the French king, and perhaps eliminate Cesare as a political force.
Events began to unfold more rapidly than the conspirators expected, but to do so in encouraging ways. On October 7 the people of San Leo, a town some ten miles from Urbino and fiercely loyal to the Montefeltro dukes, learned of the conspiracy against Cesare and spontaneously rose up against the troops he had garrisoned there. This sparked other risings elsewhere, at Urbino itself and its satellite city of Gubbio as well as several smaller places. Some of the Borgia garrisons were not only overwhelmed but annihilated. Suddenly Cesare found himself on the defensive, and the conspirators hastened to press their advantage. They reconvened in Magione, a town far to the south of the Romagna that became their regular meeting place. They agreed to launch two simultaneous offensives. Vitelli and the Orsini would advance together on Urbino, their objective to restore Guidobaldo as duke. Giovanni Bentivoglio’s son Ermes, meanwhile, was to attack Cesare directly at his Imola headquarters.
Word came to Imola of setback after setback, disaster after disaster. Seeing that he was overextended, Cesare sent instructions for the two Spaniards he had left in command at Urbino, his friend Michelotto Corella and Ugo de Moncada, to pull back to Imola. They obeyed reluctantly, hating to surrender such a prize. Almost as soon as they were gone, Duke Guidobaldo returned, offering his palace to his fellow conspirators as their new base. To the south, Oliverotto Euffreducci of Fermo helped the last surviving son of Giulio Cesare Varano to retake Camerino. News of Guidobaldo’s restoration caused two more towns loyal to the Montefeltri, Fossombrone and Pergola, to rise against Cesare’s troops, almost all of whom were Spanish, and kill them to the last man. Virtually all this trouble was south of the Romagna, in Umbria and the March. The Romagna itself remained quiet, its garrisons unthreatened; Cesare’s care to win the support of the population was showing its value.
Michelotto and Moncada were on the march when they learned of the loss of Camerino, Fossombrone, and Pergola and the slaughter of their Spanish comrades. Furious, they cast aside Cesare’s instructions and changed direction. Their troops, veteran Spaniards hungry for revenge, were unleashed to pillage without restraint. They reduced Fossombrone and Pergola to smoldering rubble, subjecting their populations to every imaginable outrage before essentially wiping them out. When news of these horrors reached Vitelli and Baglioni, they joined forces with Paolo and Francesco Orsini and set out in pursuit of the marauders. The two sides met near the village of Calmazzo, and the battle that followed was another disaster for Cesare. Moncada was taken prisoner, Michelotto barely managed to escape, and the remains of their army were driven in disorder back down the coast.
Ermes Bentivoglio, at about this same time, captured a fortress just seven miles from Imola. Cesare was nearly surrounded, virtually under siege, and his enemies had the initiative. A momentum was building that seemed almost certain to sweep him away.
Background
THE NEWEST PROFESSION
HISTORIANS OF ITALY IN THE TIME OF THE RENAISSANCE ARE ABLE to draw on a rich (if by no means always reliable) source of information that did not exist in earlier periods, or even in other parts of Europe at the same time.
The source in question consists of the reports of ambassadors—of permanent ambassadors, a breed not previously seen—stationed first at Rome and later at other capitals by the leading Italian states. Like all source materials, these reports require careful handling, diplomats being as susceptible as anyone else to not knowing as much as they think they know, seeing what they want or expect to see, and allowing their prejudices to contaminate their judgment. When such factors are taken into account, however, the dispatches of the ambassadors add a new dimension to our understanding. And in the time of the Borgias their contribution really was new. Routine diplomacy as we understand it today, diplomacy conducted by professionals sent to take up residence in foreign capitals and represent the interests of their home states for extended periods of time, began at about the time Rodrigo Borgia was born. By the time he was pope, it had evolved into something very like its twenty-first-century form.
That it first emerged in Italy was no accident. Its immediate antecedents lay in the Church, which as the only international institution to survive the fall of the Roman Empire was for a long time almost the sole means by which Europeans were able to maintain a sense of shared identity, of belonging to a common civilization. That the Church like the old empire was centered on Rome added to its credibility, its usefulness, in this regard.
Canon law, essential to the Church’s cohesion and coherence, kept alive the old imperial notion that some rules were important enough to apply to every part of the community. The sending out of cardinals as papal legates to all parts of Europe, though these envoys were generally expected to achieve some specific purpose and return to Rome when they had done so, put in place the first rudiments of diplomatic representation to be seen since classical times. A special vocabulary came into general use: legatusbecame the name for anyone sent to represent someone else, a nuncio was a person authorized to deliver messages only, a procurator (later plenipotentiary) was a senior emissary empowered to negotiate on behalf of his master.
Systematic diplomacy ceased to be the exclusive province of the Church early in the fifteenth century, as a direct result of what was happening in Italy. Beyond the Alps the German empire had become a shambles, and France and Spain had not yet pulled themselves together into the dominating powers that they would soon become. But in Italy the expulsion of the Holy Roman emperors had left a vacuum that was being filled, as we saw earlier, by a multitude of more or less new, more or less autonomous city-states. The leaders among these states—Milan, Florence, Venice—were not only the most advanced in the Western world economically and culturally, they were also secular, lacking a religion-based legitimacy in a way that was quite novel. Asked to justify the power that they possessed, those leaders could have pointed to little more than the naked force with which they kept domestic rivals in submission and external enemies out.
Being geographically small, the new Italian states existed in close proximity to one another. This, and the insecurities arising out of their lack of legitimacy, contributed to their being often at war. Much more than in the north of Europe, where the distances between the capitals of the greatest kingdoms were so great as to make regime-threatening surprise attacks difficult if not impossible, in Italy the warlords needed to be constantly on guard, ready to react on short notice. They needed to know not only what their neighbors were doing but what they were thinking. This gave rise to the idea of sending representatives, in due course to be called ambassadors, to take up permanent residence in the capitals of states deemed sufficiently significant to warrant the attendant costs. A prime purpose of these representatives was to send home a more or less continuous stream of whatever information—or gossip—they were able to pick up.
Milan was first. Under the Visconti it grew rich enough to invest in new channels of communication, and the ambitions of its dukes stirred up so much trouble that staying informed became essential. As early as the 1420s Milan had a kind of vestigial foreign office managing a small stable of emissaries to some of the more important Italian capitals, and as the usefulness of this arrangement became apparent, it attracted imitators. Europe’s first treatise on diplomatic practice appeared in 1436, just a year after what is sometimes called the first international peace conference of the modern era succeeded in resolving, via the Treaty of Arras, a long-standing conflict between France and Burgundy. Before another two decades passed, Milan, Naples, Venice, and Florence all had permanent embassies in one another’s capitals as well as in Rome.
The papal court remained central, the hub of the West’s farthest-reaching and most sophisticated diplomatic network, the place that the other states could least afford to ignore. Rome became therefore the center of diplomatic scheming and counterscheming, the best information exchange in Europe, the place where every ambitious young diplomat wanted to be sent. Somewhat curiously—perhaps, with foreign agents clustering around them, they saw no need—no pope before Alexander VI sent permanent ambassadors to other courts. Alexander began doing so in the mid-1490s under pressure of the French invasion. He first posted a nuncio at the court of the German emperor, then established permanent representation in Spain, and finally in 1500 did the same in France and Venice.
The start of the Italian Wars, especially the creation of the Holy League of 1495 and its success in driving Charles VIII out of Italy, showed the outside powers the value of the new system. Ferdinand of Spain, though never easily separated from a gold ducat, nevertheless was early to see the light. In short order he found it worthwhile to establish embassies at Rome, Venice, London, Brussels, and the German emperor’s court. Before the end of Alexander’s reign all the major powers were doing the same.