20
On January 18, 1503, moving slowly as he entered the hills of eastern Tuscany so as to give his troops time to ravage the towns and farmsteads that had the misfortune to lie in their path, Cesare finally had his prisoners Paolo and Francesco Orsini strangled. As at Senigallia the deed was done by Michelotto, quietly, and it reflected the hard fact that the war on the Orsini had passed the point of no return—the point at which too much damage had been done for reconciliation to be conceivable. What provoked comment was not so much the killings themselves—they were colorless events compared with what was happening in and around Rome—as Cesare’s mysterious release of his third Orsini prisoner, an obscure figure known as Roberto of Pitigliano. This answered the question, people said, of how Cesare had kept himself so well informed throughout the conspiracy that had nearly undone him. Obviously, they said, this Roberto had been Cesare’s secret agent, his prime source of intelligence. And now he had his reward.
Following as they did on the heels of the murders at Senigallia, these latest killings consolidated Cesare’s reputation as not only the most feared man in Italy but, at least among the ruling and fighting classes, the most respected as well. Machiavelli, freshly restored to home and family by the time of this second round of stranglings, was typical in his approval. Like everyone associated with Florence’s post-Medici republic, he celebrated the liquidation of men as dedicated to the restoration of the old regime as Vitellozzo Vitelli and his henchmen. For him, however, the meaning of what Cesare had done went further. The murders removed any doubt, as far as he was concerned, about Valentino being a man of destiny—about whether his talents, ambition, strength of will, and sheer ruthless courage made him the leader for which all Italy was unconsciously yearning, the one capable of freeing the peninsula from the barbarians. Machiavelli began to invest in Cesare all his hopes for the deliverance of his homeland.
It was said—probably without encouragement from Cesare, who was little more inclined to explain his conduct than to reveal his plans—that the killings had been committed in self-defense. Many believed them a necessary countermove against men whom Cesare knew with certainty to be once again planning to kill him. This is in no way implausible. Vitelli, Oliverotto, and the others were not only murderers but vicious murderers, and endlessly treacherous. If Lucrezia’s onetime almost-fiancé Francesco duke of Gravina was made of better stuff, he was an Orsini all the same and could hardly have been allowed to survive after seeing so many of his kinsmen cut down. Regardless of whether the killings were, strictly speaking, necessary or at least defensible, they were widely regarded as sensible and appropriate. Every tyrant still in power in Italy, and every city and town south of Venice and Milan and north of Naples, learned that the only available alternatives were to cooperate with Cesare or prepare to fight him to the death.
Place after place therefore prostrated itself at Cesare’s feet. Within a week after leaving Senigallia, he was master of the Vitelli family’s stronghold of Città di Castello and of Oliverotto’s Fermo, both of which sent out welcoming parties as soon as Borgia troops appeared on the horizon. Gian Paolo Baglioni, whose refusal to trust Cesare or join his impresa had saved him from sharing the fate of his cronies at Senigallia, found it prudent to flee his home base of Perugia, so that it too fell peaceably. Cesare stayed on the move, sweeping up everything in his path, and by the time of the second strangling he was at the walls of Siena. He demanded that the city expel its tyrant Pandolfo Petrucci, who like Baglioni had been too wary to join in the rendezvous at Senigallia. Cesare promised Petrucci safe passage out of the city and went through the motions of preparing an attack that he had no intention of carrying out because Siena was now among the places under Louis XII’s protection. The city’s elders wanted no trouble—were making it clear that they wanted Petrucci to go—but he was in no hurry to give up the rich and beautiful city of which he had been master for much of his life.
The Orsini too were unwilling to go quietly. They knew that Alexander and Cesare were now intent upon their utter destruction, and that their only options were to fight or perish. Led by Virginio Orsini’s son Gian Giordano and Niccolò Orsini, count of Pitigliano, joined by the Savelli clan and even some of the surviving but imperiled elements of the Colonna, they used their remaining strongholds near Rome as bases from which to launch a surprise counteroffensive against Rome. The troops that Cesare had left behind turned them back at the Ponte Nomentano at the north end of the city, but not before the attack put such a scare into the pope that he demanded the return of Cesare’s army. Learning of this, and assuming that Cesare must now be hurrying toward Rome, the Orsini withdrew to their hilltop castles. With them fled Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, who though the brother of Lucrezia’s husband Alfonso had reason to be afraid: to his long list of sexual conquests he had recently added Cesare’s favorite mistress, the celebrated Fiammetta, and Jofrè Borgia’s wife Sancia. The pope in disgust had Sancia confined to the Castel Sant’Angelo and demanded that Jofrè bestir himself to take a hand in dealing with those Orsini who had not run away.
On January 28 Pandolfo Petrucci finally departed Siena. Cesare, in spite of his promise of safe passage, dispatched cavalry to find him and take him prisoner. Once again, however, Petrucci was saved by the skepticism that life among killers had ingrained in him. Guessing correctly that Cesare had no intention of keeping his word, he took to the back roads and managed to slip away to refuge in Lucca. Two days later, in an absurdly belated effort to ingratiate itself with Cesare, the signoria of Siena issued a decree expelling the already absent Petrucci. Whatever temptation Cesare may have felt to sack the city was overridden by his unwillingness to antagonize the French. Instead he started southward toward Rome, allowing his soldiers to plunder until they entered the Papal States, then stopping to regroup at Viterbo.
A breach was opening between him and the pope, one so serious that it threatened to alter the whole strategic situation. The immediate issue at this point was where to send the papal army and how to use it. Alexander, faced with continuing disturbances and sensitive to the Vatican’s vulnerability, insisted that the army return to Rome. He wanted to use it first to control and defend the city, then to go on the offensive and drive the Orsini out of their remaining strongpoints. His prime targets were Ceri, Cerveteri, Bracciano, and Pitigliano, because if they could be taken, the clan would be stripped of the means to defend itself. Cesare, an adventurer to the marrow of his bones but rarely a reckless one, took a different view of what was possible. He could see nothing but trouble rising out of even a successful campaign against Bracciano and Pitigliano; the former belonged to the late Virginio’s sons, regarded as friends by Louis XII, while the lord of Pitigliano, Count Niccolò Orsini, held a condotta as commander in chief of Venice’s armies. And so Cesare dragged his heels, letting more than a week go by without moving out of Viterbo. Alexander fumed.
Not that the pope’s anger was unreasonable. The Orsini were playing their old game, creating so much disorder in and around Rome that it amounted to guerrilla warfare, and meanwhile the imprisoned Cardinal Orsini’s brother Giulio, from his base at Ceri, was disrupting the operations of the alum mines at Tolfa. On February 7 the pope declared the Orsini to be rebels against the Church (a transparently self-serving charge, but not exactly false under the circumstances) and therefore excommunicated. Without consulting Cesare he dispatched artillery for use in a siege of Bracciano. When Cesare objected, the pope, in an outburst that revealed how unhappy he was with the situation, threatened him with the loss of all his fiefs. Cesare at last responded, but with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. He sent his siege equipment not to Bracciano but to the less defensible Ceri. Barely a week after getting his troops into position there, in company with his cousin Cardinal Ludovico Borgia and his wife’s brother Cardinal Amanieu d’Albret, he returned to Rome. Once there he showed less interest in conferring with Alexander than in indulging in the pleasures of the pre-Lenten carnival. He was seen coming and going at all hours, his habit of wearing a mask drawing little attention in streets crowded with drunken and masked revelers. For a brief period Cesare the pleasure-seeking youth eclipsed Cesare the calculating empire builder. And the tension between him and the pope threatened to become a rupture.
The situation was fraught with difficulty for all the rulers of Italy. Even Louis XII had constantly to balance shifting and sometimes conflicting priorities: his need for papal endorsement of his claim to Naples, and for the papal army, against the need to keep the Borgias from becoming unmanageable. The need to keep Cesare under control against the need not to drive Alexander back into the arms of Spain. When in late February the city of Pisa offered to make itself subject to Cesare in hope of getting desperately needed assistance in its long fight for independence from Florence, Louis decided that the pendulum was swinging too far in favor of the Borgias. He pulled Florence, Bologna, Lucca, and Siena together in a new league, making all these cities (some of which he had previously betrayed) not only his allies but his wards and therefore safe from Cesare. This exacerbated the pope’s uneasiness and worsened his differences with Cesare.
All these troubles were deepened by what was happening in Naples, where the inevitable breakdown of the accord by which France and Spain had divided the conquered kingdom was proceeding apace. As clashes along the border between the French and Spanish sectors grew more intense, the two powers found themselves sliding into a winner-take-all war. The Spanish had two great advantages: the proximity of Naples’s southern provinces to their island kingdom of Sicily, a secure base from which troops and supplies could be sent without difficulty, and the command of their forces by the best soldier then living. Gonsalvo the Great Captain had continued to display the gifts for which he had originally become famous in Spain and at the time of Charles VIII’s invasion. Fifty years old at the start of the war with Louis XII, he was at the height of his powers, always able, somehow, to find unexpected ways of dealing with whatever his enemies threw at him.
His opponent in 1503, Bernard Stewart d’Aubigny, was yet another remarkable figure. Descended from Scottish nobles who had entered the service of the French crown and been rewarded with titles and land, he had over the years been commander of the royal bodyguard, leader of the French troops that accompanied Henry Tudor on the invasion of England that ended in his becoming King Henry VII, and French governor first of Milan and then of the city of Naples. At the start of his confrontation with Gonsalvo’s Spaniards he had a numerical advantage so substantial that it was generally expected to be decisive, but step by step he found himself being outwitted, outmaneuvered, and finally, humiliatingly, outfought. By springtime Gonsalvo was on the offensive, and as his troops swept forward, some sixty-five fortified towns surrendered without so much as pretending to resist. April 1503 decided the matter: on the twenty-first day of that month a Spanish force freshly arrived from Sicily defeated d’Aubigny and took him prisoner. One week later, at Cerignola, Gonsalvo used explosives in a way never previously attempted to crush the main French army. Among the heroes of the hour were Fabrizio and Prospero Colonna, the same cousins and partners who had narrowly escaped falling into the hands of the Borgias after the fall of Don Fadrique and who soon thereafter had signed on with Gonsalvo. Their contribution at Cerignola was an impressive one: the breaking of the usually impregnable formations of d’Aubigny’s Swiss mercenaries.
Cesare had remained in Rome after the end of carnival, still resisting the pope’s demands that he prosecute the war on the Orsini. Finally, and only in response to Alexander’s mounting threats and imprecations, he had set off on April 6 to resume command of the siege at Ceri. En route, however, he was met by a Rome-bound messenger carrying news that Giulio Orsini had surrendered Ceri, his rocca having been broken to bits by Cesare’s artillery and all hope of rescue ended by a message from Louis XII urging him to give up. Louis, though unhappy about the Borgia attack on Ceri, had found himself obliged to abandon the city by the deteriorating position of his forces in Naples and his increasingly urgent need for Cesare’s army. Cesare hastened to work out a formal settlement with the now-helpless Giulio Orsini, and the agreement that followed was of course heavily in favor of the Borgias. Its central provision was a gift to the pope, the realization of a lifelong dream: Giulio agreed to renounce his family’s claim to its possessions nearest Rome. In return he accepted scattered estates in faraway places and safe passage for himself and his family to Niccolò Orsini’s base at Pitigliano. Alexander, still intent on the absolute elimination of the Orsini, cannot have been pleased when he learned of Cesare’s most important concession. He had promised to attack neither Pitigliano nor the only bastion of importance remaining to the Orsini within striking distance of Rome, the late Virginio’s great castle at Bracciano, now the lair of his sons. Cesare, however, was not being cowardly or foolishly generous. Pitigliano was all but untouchable because implicitly under Venetian protection, and Louis of France had declared Bracciano to be under his umbrella—porous though that umbrella had often proved to be.
The war against the Orsini was thus over, and on terms that Cesare at least found altogether satisfactory. To the extent that Alexander was not as pleased, he too had his reasons. So long as Bracciano remained in Orsini hands, the clan would have a base from which to challenge papal authority in the region. And it was not certain that an attack on it could not have been successful. The straits in which King Louis found himself would have made him hesitate before deciding to take military action against the Borgias and would have limited his ability to bring sufficient force to bear had he overcome his hesitation. The situation was too complicated, the variables too numerous, to judge conclusively that Cesare was right and Alexander wrong or vice versa. Cesare, in any case, was having things his way.
He was by this point convinced that he could never be his own man, that his conquests could never be secure, so long as he was dependent on either France or Spain. The chronic tension between him and the pope over where to position themselves in the Franco-Spanish rivalry simply underscored the seriousness of the problem. His solution was to cut himself off from Louis XII and the alliance that had been the cornerstone of Borgia policy since his first visit to the French court. This was an understandable move in light of Louis XII’s financial, military, and political difficulties and his growing skepticism about Borgia power. Its effects on the Vatican, however, proved to be morally corrosive. Alexander, hard-pressed to satisfy Cesare’s demands but unwilling to deny him and so risk the loss of what had already been gained at such great cost, created eighty new positions in the Curial bureaucracy and sold them at average price of 760 ducats per job. Two weeks later a respected veteran of the Sacred College, Pope Paul II’s nephew Cardinal Giovanni Michiel, died a prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo at the end of two days of violent vomiting. His personal fortune, believed to exceed 150,000 ducats, was seized for the papal treasury. As invariably happened in such cases, poisoning was rumored, and this is one instance in which the rumors cannot be dismissed out of hand.
The faithful Michelotto Corella, the strangler of Senigallia, began using his new position as governor of Rome to extort money from the population. Among his methods were accusing members of the city’s growing Spanish community of being “Marani”—Muslims pretending to be Christian—and forcing Jews to buy exemption from harassment. This last was a surprising departure for the pope, who up to this point had been a friend to Rome’s Jews, welcoming refugees from the Spanish Inquisition. It indicates the degree to which his better nature was shriveling under the pressure of Cesare’s ceaseless demands.
The capture of d’Aubigny and the defeat at Cerignola had done nothing to diminish Louis XII’s hunger for Naples—a hunger sharpened by the knowledge that Ferdinand, his only competitor for the Neapolitan crown, was also his sole rival for first place among the monarchs of Europe. The survivors of Cerignola were still limping homeward when Louis undertook the creation, at Parma, of a replacement army under Louis de La Trémoille, a commander whose war record in Brittany and impressive performance following Charles VIII’s retreat from Naples made him seem a possible match for Gonsalvo. The do-or-die character of the campaign that La Trémoille was about to launch, the knowledge that failure this time could put Naples out of reach for the foreseeable future, made it imperative that the troops of the Borgias become involved on the French side.
After all he had done for Cesare, Louis must have been appalled to find the Borgias driving a hard bargain. In return for full support they demanded the surrender of Bracciano and a free hand to do as they wished in Tuscany—to do as they wished, that is, with Florence and Siena and all the territories traditionally ruled by those cities. These things were out of the question, not only because La Trémoille’s army in advancing on Naples was going to have to pass through Tuscany, but because there were no circumstances under which King Louis could have accepted such a further expansion of Roman, or Borgia, power. Thus ended the alliance with France. It was replaced by an uneasy neutrality that left Alexander and Cesare hanging somewhere between a failing and resentful Louis XII and a Spain that was becoming so powerful as to have little need for Italian friends in Rome or elsewhere. When Gonsalvo took possession of the city of Naples in mid-May, his triumph signaled that Spain had replaced France as Europe’s dominant power. It did nothing, however, to resolve the nagging question of how the Borgias should relate to the two powers, or to settle the rift between Alexander and Cesare. Predictably, Alexander wanted to repair his old friendship with Ferdinand. Cesare’s position was probably shrewder, if little less predictable. He argued that, while Ferdinand could if he chose treat Rome with cold indifference and had no reason to care if the Borgias succeeded or failed, Louis XII’s need was greater than ever. If he retrieved his position in Naples, this king whose marriage to Anne of Brittany was producing only daughters and stillborn sons would be in a position to reward his friends extravagantly. Even if he failed in Naples, he would continue to dominate northern Italy and have the power to decide Cesare’s fate in the Romagna and elsewhere.
Strange things were happening, symptoms of a deeply unsettled time and impenetrable intrigues. In May Cesare issued orders for the arrest, wherever he might be found, of a Monsignor Francesco Troches, one of the pope’s secretaries. After being pursued from Rome to Civitavecchia and then to Genoa and Sardinia, Troches was finally apprehended in Corsica. He then either committed suicide by throwing himself off the galley returning him to Italy or, depending on which story is believed, was brought back to Rome and quietly executed. What this was all about has never been entirely explained, but the most persuasive hypothesis is that he had been discovered spying for France—providing information about the pope’s surreptitious attempts to revive his long-dead lines of communication with Ferdinand and Spain.
The body of another of Alexander’s close associates, Jacopo da Santa Croce, was found one morning on one of the Tiber bridges. People were reminded of the discovery, on a morning in the Romagna many months before, of the body of Cesare’s man Lorqua. Was this too a message of some kind? If so, what was the message? And who was it for? Who, for that matter, was sending it? Could Cesare possibly be sending anonymous signals to the pope? None of the proffered answers was particularly convincing. The atmosphere in Rome was growing dark and ominous.
Word circulated—supposedly leaked out of the Vatican—that the pope was negotiating with Maximilian of Hapsburg, the Holy Roman emperor-elect, to have Pisa, Siena, and Lucca all bestowed on Cesare as imperial fiefs. Which would have been interesting, even meaningful, if the emperor were in a position to do anything in Italy. But he had little enough power north of the Alps, thanks to the political fragmentation of Germany, and absolutely none farther south.
It was said too that Louis XII was offering to give all of Naples to Cesare in trade for the Romagna and Bologna. Which might have made sense if the king were in possession of Naples, which he no longer was. Or if Cesare had any voice at all in the status of Bologna, which of course he didn’t.
At the furthest extreme of absurdity, it was said finally that Alexander was talking with Venice about having Cesare elected pope. The variety and increasing improbability of these stories is less reflective of anything actually happening than of the prevailing confusion and fear.
Behind all the nonsense, however, lay one monumental reality. Circumstances and his own actions had converged to raise Cesare above every other prince in Italy, kings from the outside of course excluded. As the summer of 1503 began, everything seemed to be—and in fact almost everything was—working in his favor. The city of Rome and its nobles, the papal bureaucracy, the College of Cardinals—all had been subdued and were under Cesare’s control either directly or through the pope. The baronial clans that for centuries had been the bane of every pope had been beaten, scattered, slaughtered. The tyrants who until recently had ruled city after city across the Papal States were mostly dead or in exile; only the Ferrara of the Este and the Bologna of the Bentivoglio were not yet under Borgia rule. Ferdinand of Spain had no need to interfere with Cesare, Louis of France no wish to offend him or the pope. Cesare had an army under Michelotto encamped at Perugia awaiting orders, and he was at liberty to do with it almost anything he wished.
Cesare spent most of July in the Romagna, making preparations for whatever it was he intended to do next. Early in the month he had assembled his cavalry, including newly hired units of Albanian light horse for which he clearly had big plans, for a grand review in which he himself rode proudly at the head of the lead squadron and Michelotto led the second. Three days later Alexander appointed him vicar in perpetuity of the late Vitellozzo Vitelli’s old home base of Città di Castello. This made Cesare lord of a substantial city at the very edge of Florentine territory, a good platform for a move against Florence itself. It seemed yet another provocation, deliberate if oblique, of Louis XII.
At the start of August, with all in readiness but his intentions as secret as ever, Cesare made a visit to Rome. He found the city in the grip of one of the stifling midsummer heat waves for which it has always been notorious. The pope was in residence, having found it impossible to withdraw to the cool of the hills with so much going on, but Cesare found him in robust good health and his old high spirits. All Rome was electric with expectation; La Trémoille’s troops were known to be in Tuscany and on their way south, which meant that the next showdown between France and Spain was imminent. Fever was rampant in the city and indeed in the Vatican, as was to be expected in Rome at this time of year. Among its victims was one of Alexander’s oldest friends, the elder of the two cardinals named Giovanni Lanzol Borgia. “It is a bad month for us fat people,” the pope ruefully observed as a procession took his cousin’s body to its grave.
On August 5 a Vatican regular named Adriano Castelli da Corneto, a onetime secretary to the pope and one of the latest crop of new cardinals, gave a party at his hillside vineyard in Rome. Alexander attended, as did Cesare; probably it was a going-away party organized in the latter’s honor.
No doubt it was an afternoon of good food, good wine, the jollity with which the Borgias always spiced social occasions, and—especially as the sun began to set—swarms of river-bred mosquitoes. It certainly was among the most fateful parties ever to take place in Europe. It is possible that the whole subsequent history of Italy, and certain that the remaining chapters in the story of the Borgias, would have turned out very differently if it had never been given. Or if Cesare, at least, had not been in Rome to attend.
Background
SUPERSTITIONS: ANOTHER SIDE OF THE RENAISSANCE
SEARCHING FOR RATIONAL EXPLANATIONS OF WHY EVEN SOME of the most powerful figures in Renaissance Italy did the things they did when they did them can be a fool’s errand. With improbable frequency such people acted less on the basis of a cool analysis of whatever predicament they happened to be in, or a careful weighing of their options, or even what they were feeling, than in accordance with what their astrologers told them.
This is part of a dark, or at least a singularly unimpressive, side of the world that produced the Borgias. Fact-based knowledge of the inner workings of the physical universe being as limited as it was in that world, superstition was rampant. People at all levels of society turned for understanding and guidance not only to astrology but to its sister disciplines of alchemy and necromancy and various schools of magic. If this is not often mentioned, the reason may be that it does not easily fit in with what we like to think about the Renaissance. We want to think of it as a period of glorious achievements in arts and letters, not as a time when it was generally taken for granted that someone as hardheaded as Cesare Borgia could rely on someone else’s interpretation of what the stars were saying to arrive at decisions on which his future and his very life might depend.
Astrology’s roots were deep, reaching back to the beginnings of recorded history in Egypt, Babylon, Persia, China, and the Greco-Roman world. This is understandable; as people began to observe the patterns and movements of the heavens, it is hardly surprising that they should have searched for meaning in what they saw. Astrology was widely followed in the Roman Empire until Constantine the Great, having converted to Christianity, launched a persecution of its practitioners that would keep it underground for half a millennium. In conjunction with astronomy it flourished in the Arab world, however, and as contacts between Arabs and Christians became more common and intense, especially in Spain, astrology resurfaced and was soon again widespread.
The greatest of the thirteenth century’s Holy Roman emperors, Frederick II, went nowhere without his astrologers. The Gian Galeazzo Visconti who in the fourteenth century became Milan’s first duke acknowledged that “I observe astrology in all my affairs,” his fifteenth-century successor Ludovico Sforza saw to the appointment of four professors of astrology at the University of Pavia, and an acquaintance of Duke Ercole d’Este complained that he “fills up his time with astrology and necromancy.” By Ercole’s time there was almost no such thing as an Italian court that did not employ astrologers; this was no less true of the Medici of Florence and the equally cultivated Montefeltri of Urbino than of the most brutish warlords. Alone or in conjunction with such other practices as geomancy (deciphering the patterns formed by a handful of thrown earth) and chiromancy (palm reading), astrology was used to foretell the future and decide what should be done, or when, or where. The secrets of the stars were applied in the practice of medicine and had an accepted place in the administration of justice.
Not surprisingly, considering the challenge that the fatalistic determinism implicit in astrology posed for orthodox Christianity, astrology was opposed by the Church from its earliest days. In the fourteenth century the great humanist scholar Petrarch ridiculed it with icy contempt. A hundred years after him the philosopher Pico della Mirandola attacked it with such devastating effect, pointing to its incompatibility with Christian notions of free will and divine providence, as to reduce its popularity noticeably. It persisted all the same. Though Pope Pius II was stern in his condemnation, Sixtus IV was a devoted believer, and so was his nephew Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. Much later, in the sixteenth century, there would be periods when ambassadors were not admitted to the papal court or that of the Holy Roman emperor until they had the approval of the official astronomers. One of Savonarola’s persistent criticisms of leading clerics of his day was their reliance on astrological readings. He never attacked Alexander VI on those grounds, however, and there is scant reason to think that Alexander, onetime protégé of the skeptical Pius II, took astrology at all seriously.
Wherever astrology was popular, alchemy was usually popular as well. Easily ridiculed for the attempts of practitioners to discover the so-called philosopher’s stone and to use it to turn base metals into silver and gold, alchemy too had ancient roots and was not as childish as is generally believed. In its loftier forms it was a pursuit of purity and perfection: alchemists believed that if they could discover how to turn lead into the purest and most perfect of metals, gold, they would then be able to do something analogous with people, turning them not into gold but into superior beings, healthy, wise, and immensely long-lived.
There was nothing that admirable about necromancy, the use of ritual and formula to make contact with the dead and enlist their help in putting curses on enemies, acquiring some desired possession, or learning such secrets as who committed a crime or where a lost object might be found. It was at least as old as astrology, but it had always been less respectable. Moses in his law code made it a capital offense, and millennia later Leonardo da Vinci scornfully observed that “of all human opinions that is to be reputed the most foolish which deals with the belief in necromancy.”
Astrology appears to have been far more widely embraced in Italy than elsewhere in Europe. (The University of Paris condemned it in 1494, by which date it was being taught at universities across Italy.) Paradoxically, the difference may have stemmed from Italy’s unique status as the birthplace of the Renaissance and from the work of its scholars in rediscovering the literature of the distant past. Astrology’s credibility was enhanced by the many ancient texts on the subject that the Italian humanists were unearthing and translating. The cryptic character of such texts helped to make astrology seem both mysterious and a legitimate subject of study, worthy of close attention. It offered the same things it had offered thousands of years before: a way of drawing meaning from the night sky and making sense of a baffling world.
Astrology’s failure to get such a firm grip on imaginations outside Italy did not mean that the Italians were more credulous than people elsewhere. For whatever reason, north of the Alps there was less interest in astrology than in magic, which involved the belief that one could achieve even the most ignoble of ends by entering into relations with spirits from other worlds, and which came in “black” and “white” varieties. Thus the appeal of witchcraft, and the fears of the orthodox that witches existed in great numbers and possessed secret spells and concoctions that could make people love or hate one another, visit terrible afflictions upon them, and work all manner of mischief. In 1484 an antiwitchcraft bull of Pope Innocent VIII sparked witch hunts on a terrifying scale—in a single year forty-one accused individuals were burned at the stake in the town of Como—with reverberations echoing down to Salem, Massachusetts, two-plus centuries later.
It was all part of the environment in which the people of fifteenth-century Europe lived their lives, and it would remain a central part of that environment until the first real scientists appeared on the scene with their demands for bona fide evidence and their emphasis on repeatable experiments. In the interim, ironically, superstition contributed in important ways to the birth of science. The work of astrologers in studying the heavens did more than anything else to expand the knowledge of astronomy, just as alchemy turned out to be the parent of chemistry. Ultimately, inevitably, astrology and its sister superstitions were reduced to the marginal things they are today, sources of harmless amusement for many, of income for others, and of irrational obsessions for an unfortunate few.