19
On October 7, with the rebellion of a number of Cesare’s conquered towns in full flower and the extent of the conspiracy against him just coming into focus, Machiavelli arrived at Imola. He had been sent, as before, in response to a message from Cesare saying that he had important matters to discuss. The fact that he traveled alone this time, as a “special envoy” rather than as part of a full-fledged embassy headed by a senior official, reflected the confidence of Florence’s government that now it really was under the protection of France, and that it had little to fear from someone as beset with troubles as the young Borgia upstart.
The Ten, the council that managed Florence’s relations with other states, had instructed Machiavelli not to offer Cesare assistance of any kind or do anything that might even suggest an alliance. He was to request safe passage through the Romagna for Florentine merchants—an important issue, but not of the highest urgency under current circumstances—and offer Cesare asylum. This last may have been intended as a subtle insult, implying as it did that Cesare was or soon might be in need of refuge and that Florence, the tables having turned, was strong enough to provide it. Machiavelli’s real purpose, in any case, was obvious. It was to stay as close to Cesare as possible and gather as much information as he could. It was not a mission that he welcomed—he wanted to be in Florence, at home—and almost as soon as he was settled in Imola, he began asking for permission to return. His requests were ignored, and almost his only consolation was the surprising amount of access he was granted to the similarly idle Cesare. Though nothing in the way of business was accomplished, Machiavelli having no authority to do or propose anything, with each new encounter he was impressed afresh. What struck him above all was Cesare’s cool self-confidence, his ability to remain clearheaded and at ease even as his political and military situation appeared to be collapsing. He was not only calm but in high spirits. The offer of asylum he shrugged aside, without taking offense and nearly without comment.
Machiavelli might have been less surprised by his host’s sangfroid if he had been as well informed as Cesare was about the general state of affairs. He didn’t know, when he arrived at Imola, that Cesare was aware that his disloyal condottieri had recently asked the Ten for help and been refused. This soon became clear, however: without disclosing anything of his own plans, Cesare revealed his understanding that the Florentine government could never have supported the plotters—would have found it impossible to do so even if the conspiracy had not been dominated by such deadly enemies of the republic as Vitellozzo Vitelli and the Orsini. Any move in that direction would have risked alienating Louis of France, Florence’s sole and indispensable protector.
Cesare knew that Venice too had been asked to assist the conspirators and had likewise turned them away. And he understood its reasons for doing so. La Serenissima, trapped in its life-or-death struggle with the Turks, was in far too much need of papal and French help—or of their neutrality, at an absolute minimum—to consider taking sides against the Borgias. Its leading merchants, focused as always on protecting the Mediterranean trading routes that were the wellspring of their wealth, had little experience of thecondottieri who had turned on Cesare and no reason to loathe them as the Florentines did. But they also could see no reason to want them to succeed. If the fragmentation of the Romagna had for centuries helped the Venetians to feel secure on their mainland frontier, and if the consolidation of the region under Cesare was no cause for celebration, nevertheless it would have been folly to throw in with an unstable coalition of rogues formed for the sole purpose of destroying Cesare Borgia. Such a step could only make an implacable enemy of the pope, stir up trouble with France, and secure the futures of some of the worst men in Italy. These things were unthinkable.
And a roguish lot the conspirators definitely were. That would be their damning weakness: the fact that they were, many and even most of them, of such repellent character as to be incapable not only of winning outside support but even of trusting one another. Throughout the generations when fratricide was almost commonplace among tyrant families, the Baglioni of Perugia had murdered one another with a frequency that was startling even to their contemporaries. Dubious paternity was so commonplace in the family as to make it uncertain that the Baglioni of 1502, current clan leader Gian Paolo included, were in fact descended from the ones who had first made themselves masters of Perugia a century before.
Tall and blond with striking good looks, at age thirty-two Gian Paolo was as practiced as any of his forebears in using force and terror to keep his subjects subdued. While it is unlikely that he could have been guilty of all the outrages of which his enemies accused him, he was undoubtedly capable of cruelty on an epic scale. On several occasions he had men whom he had decided were his foes, more than a few of them clearly innocent of any offense, hanged en masse because doing so suited either his political purposes or his whim at the moment. Machiavelli, who described him as “a man who cohabited with his sister, and had massacred his cousins and his nephews,” would in later years condemn him not for his crimes but for lacking the resolve to murder a sixteenth-century pope when he had him, briefly, in his power.
Even worse—improbable as that may seem—was Oliverotto Euffreducci. At twenty-seven he was lord of the unfortunate city of Fermo by virtue of having murdered the uncle who raised him and always treated him generously. He had started his career soldiering in the service of Gian Paolo Baglioni, attaching himself to Vitellozzo Vitelli after the former’s execution. Like the Vitelli and Baglioni he richly deserved the label tyrant, having terrorized the people of Fermo into dumb submission. Alone among his henchmen he has never had a single defender, anyone willing to suggest that he had redeeming qualities of any kind, even physical courage. Cesare Borgia’s best biographer, W. H. Woodward, described Oliverotto as a “harebrained adventurer” who was not so much feared or even distrusted by his associates as simply despised. Machiavelli, in writing about him, plumbed the same depths of cynicism reached in his description of Baglioni, scorning him not for murdering women and children but for lacking the cunning required for survival.
Then there was Pandolfo Petrucci, lord of Siena, at fifty the oldest of the conspirators. He was sufficiently superior in cunning and intelligence to emerge as perhaps the closest thing they had to a leader, but he was also a vicious sadist. He had achieved supreme power in Siena by murdering his father-in-law (who was probably, it must in fairness be noted, plotting to murder him first) and is best remembered for one of his favorite forms of amusement. He loved to roll boulders down on low-lying parts of Siena from the heights above, howling with delight at the resulting devastation.
The weak and gullible Paolo Orsini was among the conspirators as well. And the devious Cardinal Orsini, he of the thousand tricks, along with his slippery brother Giulio. And Gian Giordano Orsini, who had been thrown into a Neapolitan prison with his father Virginio at the time of Charles VIII’s withdrawal and was quietly awaiting his chance to avenge the old man’s miserable death. Such was the vipers’ tangle that was in league against Cesare: an assortment of sociopaths and psychopaths famous not just for ruthlessness, not just for a readiness to torture and murder the innocent, but for a willingness to betray their own blood. The one conspicuous exception was the recently deposed, even more recently restored Guidobaldo da Montefeltro. Adoring son of a majestic father, loved by the people of Urbino for his gentleness and kindness and admired by artists and scholars for his refinement, he was badly out of place in this affair and not taken seriously even by his partners. His prestige among such savages was not enhanced by rumors—almost certainly true—that he was sexually impotent, a fact that adds poignancy to his loving relationship with his wife, Francesco Gonzaga’s sister Elisabetta.
Repulsive as they were on the whole, the confederates almost certainly could have overcome Cesare if they had moved quickly, firmly, and in concert. They proved to be incapable of doing any such thing. No real leader emerged to keep them together and focused. It would be said later that Cardinal Orsini had been the driving force behind the conspiracy, and Petrucci of Siena is sometimes described as its brains, but neither demonstrated the kind of mastery that the situation required. Not one of them had an objective loftier than his own survival and perhaps that of his family; almost all would cheerfully have sacrificed the others for his own sake, and they knew one another well enough to understand this. Such things might have been manageable if they had faced a less formidable adversary. But Cesare understood them and their vulnerabilities at least as well as they understood themselves, and he was both clever enough to outwit them and tough enough to undo them.
From his base at Imola, almost certainly drawing on a secret source of intelligence inside the enemy camp, Cesare played on the conspirators’ divisions and aggravated their fears. Early on he had identified Paolo Orsini as the weakest and most seducible of his adversaries. He surreptitiously got word to Paolo of his willingness to forgive and forget, to allow the condottieri to return to his payroll while demanding nothing of consequence in return. When Paolo shared this offer with his fellow plotters at one of their gatherings at Magione, they showed more interest than was wise in a group of men who had already thrown down the gauntlet to a dangerous enemy, and Paolo was authorized to explore the matter further. In Rome, Pope Alexander opened parallel negotiations with the city’s leading Orsini and found that they too were receptive. From Siena, meanwhile, Pandolfo Petrucci sent Cesare an almost craven message, earnestly assuring him that he had never intended to displease. Wherever the Borgias tested the resolve of the men plotting against them, they found weakness and a readiness to cut deals—even separate deals, when that seemed feasible. They could be confident that in a showdown each of the conspirators would look to his own immediate interests regardless of the fate of the others.
They had reason to be worried all the same. The risings south of the Romagna, and the fact that Cesare was all but trapped at Imola, left Alexander feeling deeply insecure. He feared that everything the two of them had achieved and were planning to achieve, the whole grand enterprise into which he was pouring the wealth of the papacy, was suddenly on the verge of collapse. He complained of Cesare’s incessant demands for money and of the meager results his own generosity appeared to be producing. Carried on the grapevine, his lamentations must have boosted the confidence of the rebels.
Cesare by contrast waited and watched in silence, using his own inscrutability to unnerve his enemies. When Ermes Bentivoglio moved his troops near the outskirts of Imola but failed to provoke the expected countermove by Cesare, failed even to get an acknowledgment of his presence, he lost heart and withdrew in befuddlement. When it became certain that the plotters could expect no help from Venice or Florence, and that when Louis XII’s army arrived on the scene it would come as Cesare’s friend, their resolve disintegrated. Cesare meanwhile was continuing to receive infusions of gold from a pope too worried to tighten his purse strings, and he was using them to hire new condottieri and send agents into Lombardy to recruit fighters. He was able to keep his troops well paid, well provisioned, and loyal. Week by week, quietly, he was rebuilding his strength.
He and Machiavelli filled their idle hours with each other’s company. Though Cesare persisted in revealing little of what he knew and nothing of what he intended, his reticence only increased Machiavelli’s admiration of what he called, in explaining to his exasperated superiors why he had so little of value to report, his host’s “most commendable secrecy.” More impressed than ever with Cesare’s perceptiveness and ability to make difficult decisions quickly, he advised the Ten that as things stood, it would be folly for Florence to put itself openly at odds with such a resourceful political player.
Late in October, with the unraveling of the conspiracy too far advanced to remain secret, a nervous Paolo Orsini showed up in Imola in disguise. He was eager to cut a deal, Cesare was happy to oblige him so long as the terms put him in a commanding position, and so a conditional agreement was worked out. When Paolo carried it back to Magione, however, it drew a mixed response. Cesare’s sole hard demand was that the two cities of Urbino and Camerino—the homes of the Montefeltri and the Varani—must be returned to him. By and large, the conspirators who were not lords of either of those two cities, though no doubt less than delighted, found this a small enough price for their own deliverance. Though Vitelli and Baglioni at first poured scorn on the idea of trusting Cesare after having been so obviously bent on his destruction, and though their reptilian protégé Oliverotto lined up with them as usual, nobody else agreed, and the three gradually abandoned their objections.
Bentivoglio of Bologna, however, refused to be won over. As did Guidobaldo of Urbino—understandably so, as the terms on offer made him the principal sacrificial lamb. But the deal was accepted, the plotters took up once again their condotta with Cesare, and Guidobaldo was ordered to depart. Soon after, in making his second forced departure from the city his father had devoted his life to transforming, he would be heard to cry out to God, asking why such a fate had been visited upon him. As for whether Cesare’s demand for possession of Urbino and Camerino was in any way justified, it should be remembered that, in hostile hands, the two cities would have been ideal platforms from which to threaten the Romagna. As soon as the Varani were gone from Camerino, the pope declared it a duchy and bestowed it upon the same mysterious little Giovanni Borgia, the so-called Infant of Rome, who was already duke of Nepi. Further evidence that he was—perhaps—Cesare’s son.
In the end, thanks to the intervention of Louis XII, even Bentivoglio was persuaded to make peace. The king, wanting no disputes that might complicate the pursuit of his own goals, wanting also to retain the friendship of the pope and the use of his army without alienating a city as strategically situated as Bologna, arranged a settlement aimed at giving something to everyone. Bologna once again joined Florence in being under French protection and off limits to Cesare. In return, Bentivoglio was obliged once again to pledge a substantial payment in gold to Cesare and provide him with troops.
The conspiracy having been brought to an unsuccessful conclusion, its target and its instigators presumably reconciled, Cesare was once again eager to take the field. Machiavelli, however, came down with a fever as winter tightened its grip on the Romagnese plain, and found himself living in wretchedly constrained circumstances because Florence was neglecting to send his pay while Imola and the surrounding countryside were being picked clean by Cesare’s troops and camp followers. He sent letter after letter begging to be allowed to return home, where obligations including children, a young wife, and a widowed mother required his attention. The signori replied that he was needed where he was.
On December 10, when Cesare led his army of twelve thousand men out of Imola through a driving snowstorm, several of the former plotters were once again with him, commanding his troops. The disheartened Machiavelli, however, reported himself too ill to go along. He followed a few days later, and on December 14 caught up with the others at Cesena after a ride of thirty miles down the Via Emilia. They were still at Cesena six days later when Cesare sprang his latest surprise, suddenly ordering the French cavalry that formed the core of his force to depart for Milan and rejoin Louis XII. At a stroke he thus radically reduced the size of his army and stripped it of its best troops, and as usual he declined to explain himself. One plausible explanation is that France’s men-at-arms were simply too expensive to maintain—that in dismissing them Cesare was responding to the pope’s complaints about costs. Another is that he had seen enough of the brutish behavior of the foreigners and had decided that if he didn’t bring it to an end, he could never hope to be accepted by the populations whose lord he intended to remain. A third hypothesis, no less credible and much more intriguing in light of the events of the next three weeks, is that by sending away so many of the troops most likely to remain loyal to him, he was showing Vitelli, the Orsini, and the others that he trusted them and that they had nothing to fear.
He was still at Cesena on Christmas morning, when the townsfolk awoke to find a decapitated body on display in their central piazza. It was the corpse of the hated Ramiro de Lorqua, long one of Cesare’s most important henchmen. Its head was impaled on an upright lance, an executioner’s ax on the ground beside it. There was no need for speculation about whose work this was. Just three days before, Lorqua had been summoned to Cesena from his post at Rimini, and when he arrived, Cesare had had him placed under arrest. Thereafter he had been under interrogation, and almost certainly under torture, and evidently had revealed some dark things indeed.
Lorqua (known variously to the Italians as Lorca, de Orca, and d’Orco) had always been excessively zealous, not to say bloodthirsty, in the execution of his duties. His status as a Borgia insider is apparent in the role he had played in the negotiation of Lucrezia’s marriage to Alfonso d’Este. There had been signs of trouble even then, however: vague tales of how he had angered Cesare by somehow behaving inappropriately while escorting Lucrezia to her new life in Ferrara. More recently his rough methods as vicar-general of the Romagna had caused Cesare to demote him to Rimini, where he was now said to be enriching himself through extortion and pillage. His execution, though never explained, sent unmistakable messages. In the most forceful terms imaginable, it demonstrated to the inhabitants of the Romagna that their new duke regarded Lorqua’s misconduct as intolerable. It reinforced the signal that Cesare had sent his subjects when he placed the honest and conscientious Antonio di Monte Sansovino in charge, first in the Romagna and then elsewhere as well. Even before Lorqua’s death, Sansovino had been sent to Urbino to announce a general pardon of all who had opposed Cesare and the restoration of all the rights the population had enjoyed under the Montefeltri. Such acts were calming the conquered territories. In the Romagna especially, with its long history of misrule, they were giving the population more reasons than ever to be grateful for Cesare’s invasion.
The killing of Lorqua also helped to assuage whatever fears the former conspirators might still have felt. In part simply because he was a Spaniard, but more because of his undisguised contempt for all things Italian, Lorqua had been hated by Cesare’s Italiancondottieri. That he had known Cesare far longer than any of the warlords, and appeared to be closer to him than any of his other fellow Spaniards except Michelotto, made him greatly feared as well. His dramatic elimination, like the dismissal of the French troops, was a vivid demonstration of just how ruthless Cesare was capable of being. But it also gave Vitelli and the others reason to believe that Cesare had cast his lot irrevocably with them rather than with the French or even his old comrades from Spain.
As always, Cesare kept his secrets. Among those secrets were the things that Lorqua had revealed after his arrest—things of which Cesare may have already been informed by his secret agent inside the Orsini camp but that now could be taken as certain. Lorqua, resentful of his demotion, aware that he was out of favor and fearful of what that might portend, had entered into an improbable alliance with the members of the anti-Cesare conspiracy. Together they had begun hatching new schemes for preemptively ridding themselves of Cesare. The knowledge that he was again being plotted against explains everything that Cesare would do over the next six days. It also explains why, at exactly this point and for the first time, he began wearing a shirt of chain mail night and day.
Nevertheless, when Cesare left Cesena on December 26, he took with him only a single company of personal guards, dividing the bulk of his remaining army into units that were spread out across the landscape and ordered to proceed separately. Again he was showing his captains that he trusted them, that he was comfortable enough not to require strong protection and posed no threat to them. When Oliverotto volunteered to go on ahead with enough men to secure the coastal town of Senigallia, Cesare gave his consent. Senigallia, a papal vicariate, was held in defiance of Alexander VI by the widow of Giovanni della Rovere, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere’s brother, on behalf of her young son. Machiavelli was again traveling with Cesare, sensing as everyone did that something momentous was in the air. After a march of some forty miles southward along the coast they paused at Lucrezia’s old home of Pesaro, where they received word that Oliverotto had taken Senigallia and was preparing it for Cesare’s arrival. Two easy marches more, one of just six miles and another of a dozen, found them passing through Senigallia’s gates on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. On hand to welcome them were Oliverotto, Vitelli, and Paolo and Francesco Orsini. They did what they could to make it a triumphal occasion.
Which is how it came to pass that Machiavelli was in Senigallia when, an hour or two after midnight on the first day of 1503, Vitellozzo and Oliverotto were strangled by Cesare’s constant companion, Michelotto Corella. He used a violin string. Vitelli, it was said, begged to be allowed to live long enough to ask the pope for an indulgence that would spare him from divine punishment for his sins. Oliverotto whined and wept and blamed Vitelli for everything.
Later that same short winter day, when Cesare marched his troops out of Senigallia once again heading south, Machiavelli was as before part of the procession. So were three Orsini—Paolo, the young Francesco duke of Gravina, and a kinsman of theirs named Roberto, a member of the family’s Pitigliano branch. But they were Cesare’s prisoners now, not commanders of his troops, and they were manacled and under close guard. Back in Rome, having been advised by Cesare that aggressive action would be called for starting on New Year’s Day, Alexander was filling his prisons with as many Orsini as could be rounded up. Cardinal Orsini was in the cell where he would soon die, his palace stripped and his aged mother left to wander the streets alone, unable to find anyone not too frightened to offer her food or shelter. What was in process was not just war against the Orsini but a war of extermination.
At last, in the second week of January, Machiavelli received permission to return home. He would not see Cesare again until nine months had passed. They would meet next in Rome, in October, by which time Cesare would be once more in crisis, beset by dangers far beyond anything encountered in Imola or elsewhere, in 1502 or at any other point in his young life.
Background
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES
EVENTS THAT TRULY CHANGE THE WORLD—THAT CHANGE IT IN fundamental ways—don’t come along every year. In Europe, before the Industrial Revolution, they didn’t often happen once a century.
It is therefore more than remarkable that two such events happened within a span of five and a half years in the middle of the reign of Pope Alexander VI. The first came in March 1493, when Christopher Columbus returned to Spain after an absence of seven months to report that he had just succeeded in sailing to Asia (which is where he thought he had been). Then, in September 1499, Vasco da Gama dropped anchor at Lisbon and announced that in the course of a voyage that had taken twenty-six months he had done what no one could have imagined doing not many years before. He had rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, crossed the Indian Ocean, reached the west coast of India with its limitless supplies of spices and other precious goods, and returned alive to tell the tale.
Also remarkable is how interconnected these two events were—so much so that they nearly brought Spain and Portugal to war with each other. And how it was Alexander, more than anyone in Spain or Portugal, who did what was needed to keep the peace.
Though ultimately the less momentous of the two voyages—it didn’t lead to the discovery of two vast and previously unsuspected continents—da Gama’s was the more impressive achievement. And in the near term its results were more dramatic. It was the culmination of almost a hundred years of effort by the Portuguese royal family to promote and underwrite exploration of the unknown parts of the world. The persistence with which this program of exploration was pursued generation after generation, and the financial risks and sacrifices that it entailed, would make the global network of colonies that came to Portugal as a result about as close to being earned as it is possible for an empire to be.
It began with a son and brother of Portuguese kings who, though he personally rarely traveled and never explored anything, is rightly known to history as Prince Henry the Navigator. In 1415, a time when in all Europe there was little knowledge of astronomy or mathematics and seafarers tried to stay within sight of shore because otherwise they had dangerously little way of knowing their location or even their direction of travel, he founded a school dedicated to the development of sailors more skilled than any in Europe. By the time of his death in 1460 Portugal had such sailors in abundance. The boldest of them had journeyed far down the west coast of Africa, establishing trading stations along the way and bases on the Canary Islands, the Azores, and Madeira in the Atlantic. They had done so in ships developed under Henry’s sponsorship, the fast and nimble little caravels. He had gone to extraordinary lengths to encourage his explorers, providing and outfitting their ships, giving them an equal share in any profits from trade or plunder while making good any losses out of his own pocket.
Magnificent as these achievements were, they had a tragically dark side. The Portuguese captains, always on the lookout for financial gain, found that even the poorest sections of the African coast offered a nearly unlimited supply of human beings who could be transported to the north and profitably sold. Thus traffic in slaves, a feature of the European and Mediterranean worlds from time immemorial, became almost from the beginning a central characteristic of the Great Age of Discovery.
Henry’s work was carried on by his nephew King Afonso V, who introduced a licensing arrangement under which a Lisbon merchant was given exclusive trading rights from Guinea southward in return for exploring another four hundred miles of coastline every year. In such ways the Portuguese continued to push on into the unknown, and the late 1480s brought the greatest triumph yet: ships out of Lisbon reached what they named the Cape of Storms (the king, not wishing to discourage the less bold, changed it to the Cape of Good Hope) and entered the Indian Ocean. News of this, when it reached Portugal, electrified the royal court. It was for the first time certain that Ptolemy had been wrong, in the second century AD, when he wrote that a bridge of land blocked access to the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic. It was not impossible to sail from the Iberian peninsula to India.
This was a stunning prospect. An increasingly wealthy Europe had for generations been developing an insatiable appetite for the exotic products of India, China, and other points east—especially for the spices grown in these places. But it was able to procure them in severely limited quantities only and at exorbitant prices. These prices were the result of rarity and monopoly control: all the produce of the Orient, after it reached the bustling ports of India’s west coast, was in the hands of Arab traders who transported it by ship through the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea and then overland by caravan to the ports of the eastern Mediterranean. These merchants took big slices of profit at every stage, and at Alexandria and other ports they sold their merchandise to the Venetians and Genoese, who marked it up again in carrying it to Italy and other European markets.
There was a bonanza to be reaped by sailing from Lisbon directly to India, thereby eliminating all the middlemen. And so the Portuguese government, having established that it could be done, hurried to organize the expedition that set sail under Vasco da Gama’s command in July 1497 and reached the Indian city of Calicut in May 1498. When it returned home in September 1499, it was laden with pepper, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, and cinnamon—things nearly as precious as gold. Another, much bigger expedition was readied with all possible speed, and thus was Portugal’s global empire born. It undermined the advantages long enjoyed by Venice and the Arabs and began what gradually became a prodigious redistribution of wealth and national power.
By the time da Gama completed his great voyage, Columbus was midway through his third visit to what he would die thinking was the eastern edge of Asia. His exploits could have been another great triumph for Portugal, but in the 1480s, after hearing Columbus out, a council of experts decided that his plan to reach the Far East by sailing west was impossible. They therefore refused his request for the financing of an expedition. (The council was right and Columbus was wrong, by the way. Its members knew, as did all educated people of the time, that the world was a sphere, and they knew also that it was a much bigger sphere than Columbus believed. He argued that Asia was four thousand miles west of the Canary Islands. His judges found that ridiculous. They judged correctly, but without knowing that between the Canaries and Asia lay North and South America. No ship of the time could cover the required distance before all hands had died on board.)
Columbus, Genoese by birth, then spent years trying to sell his idea to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. He had no success until 1492, when their conquest of Granada put the royal couple in an expansive frame of mind, prompting them to provide him with three ships and crews made up largely of convicted criminals. He departed Spain on August 3 of that year, launched into the unknown on September 6 after a stop in the Canaries, and by early October was cruising among the islands of the Caribbean.
King John of Portugal was so offended by Spain’s apparent success in finding a new route to the quasi-mythic lands known to Europe as Cathay (China), Cipango (Japan), and India, so certain that the Spanish had no right to impinge upon his kingdom’s hard-earned monopoly, that he began preparations to send a Portuguese fleet across the Atlantic to lay claim to what was rightfully his. Learning of this, Ferdinand and Isabella began assembling a war fleet of their own, simultaneously appealing to Rome for a vindication of their rights. The result was a series of four papal bulls, the third of which, Inter Caetera of May 4, 1493, granted to the kingdom of Castile all discoveries more than one hundred leagues west of the Atlantic’s Cape Verde Islands. Everything east of that point went to the Portuguese. It was a stopgap solution, “league” being an ambiguous unit of measure and no one really knowing how to measure great stretches of longitude, but it averted war. A year later, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, Spain sought to assuage continuing Portuguese anger by agreeing to move the line of demarcation another 250 leagues to the west. This would lead to further momentous consequences when, in 1500, a fleet of Portuguese merchant ships en route to the Cape of Good Hope swung far to the west and happened upon the coast of Brazil. Because of the settlement that Alexander had negotiated, this vast rich land, though part of the South American continent, would for the next three centuries belong to Portugal and not Spain.