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There is reason to surmise that one man only may have been less than flabbergasted by Cardinal Alonso Borgia’s elevation to the pontifical throne, and that the man in question was Alonso himself.
This possibility arises out of virtually the only interesting story about Alonso’s early life to have come down to us—a tale that must have some sort of basis in fact, because Alonso himself appears to have believed it.
According to this story, at some point in his boyhood Alonso crossed paths with a famous holy man and preacher named Vincente Ferrer, a Spanish friar descended through his father from Scottish nobility. That such an encounter took place is in no way implausible. Ferrer, famous for working wonders and for converting huge numbers of Jews using methods that would raise eyebrows in later centuries, was a celebrated figure in Valencia in the late fourteenth century, attracting crowds wherever he appeared. He also took a doctorate in theology at the same University of Lérida where Alonso would later study and teach law.
Be all that as it may, upon meeting Alonso, Ferrer is supposed to have declared that the child would one day achieve “the highest authority which mortal man can obtain”—words that any educated European of the time would have understood as referring to the papacy. Alonso is said to have taken the prophecy to heart, and to have waited serenely for its fulfillment as men younger and still younger than himself were elected instead. All we know with certainty is that, as one of his first acts after becoming Pope Calixtus III, he saw to it that Vincente Ferrer was canonized. Today a handsome church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan bears his name.
Calixtus’s reign got off to a fast start. It was also a rocky start: on the day of the new pope’s coronation, packs of toughs affiliated with the Orsini and the Colonna roamed the streets of Rome claiming to be offended that a “Catalan” had become pope, looking for opportunities to make trouble. They so disrupted one procession that the aged pontiff was nearly thrown from his horse. The trouble was worst, predictably, wherever rival prowling gangs collided. It rose to a fever pitch when the chief of the Bracciano branch of the Orsini, Napoleone by name, tried to use the growing disorder to take revenge on an old foe. By the time the papal retinue with its eighty bishops all dressed in white had moved past the ruins of the Forum and the Colosseum and reached the Basilica of St. John Lateran, it was inching its way through something between a full-blown riot and a miniature war. Houses were being looted and set on fire. Onlookers were being attacked, even killed.
The former Alonso Borgia, a man known for nothing so much as for being “peaceable and kindly,” the dark-horse candidate who had been made pope precisely because none of his fellow cardinals could imagine him interfering in their affairs, turned to the proud and powerful Cardinal Latino Orsini, who as it happened was Napoleone’s brother, and ordered him to control his family. Now. Or else. Order was restored, the pope had put his mark on his first day in office with a forcefulness he had rarely if ever displayed in Rome, and the Orsini had been given a foretaste of the half-century of Borgia difficulties that lay in store for them.
That was nothing compared to the surprises that followed, and the speed with which Calixtus began producing them. His health so poor that on many mornings he was unable to get out of bed, he nevertheless began drawing upon previously unsuspected reserves of energy—and upon a long agenda of things he was determined to accomplish. He summoned secretaries to his bedside one after another, gave them instructions or dictated letters and bulls in a seemingly endless flow, and sent them bustling off on a bewildering variety of missions. At the center of this whirlwind, overshadowing everything else, was a subject to which Calixtus’s predecessor Nicholas V had paid the necessary lip service but rarely given real priority: the Turks.
By the time of Calixtus III’s election, the Turks had been in Europe for more than a century. With the exception of a brief period around 1400, when Mongol hordes swept through the Middle East on a vast raid that threw everything into disorder until the invaders abruptly turned around and galloped back to eastern Asia, the Ottoman armies were as voracious and seemingly unstoppable as a plague of locusts. By stages they devoured so much of the old Byzantine Christian Empire that at midcentury almost nothing remained of it except the capital, Constantinople, enfeebled almost to the point of helplessness.
Sultan Mehmed II, only twenty-three when Calixtus became pope but already as feared as anyone then living, was a worthily warlike link in a chain of land-hungry fathers and sons whose empire would ultimately encompass substantial parts of three continents and last more than six hundred years. His forefathers had emerged in the thirteenth century as heads of one of the ten or so little principalities that came to dot Anatolia (in what is now Turkey) as the Eastern Christian Empire lost its grip there. The dynasty that would take its name from the second man to head it, the emir Osman I, was consistently both more aggressive and more successful than its neighbors and began absorbing them one by one. Osman’s grandson Murad I achieved such eminence that by the 1370s he was minting his own coins and using the title “sultan”—a word connoting sovereignty, and religious as well as political authority.
Mehmed II was Murad I’s great-grandson, and by the time of his birth in 1432 the unique phenomenon that was Ottoman culture was pretty much fully formed. Among the striking features of that culture were a pervasive and remarkably creative use of slavery, polygamy on an epic scale, royal fratricide as government policy, and ingenious ways of controlling subject populations vastly more numerous than the Turks themselves. Slavery, so integral to the empire that at its zenith one in every five residents of Constantinople was officially in bondage, took such novel forms under the sultans that it became a major source of their strength. Osman I and his descendants made the improbable discovery that prisoners of war, especially the youngest of them, could be turned not only into useful fighting men but into fiercely loyal ones. This led to the creation of a system for recruiting talent on a massive scale through systematic abduction. Every five years the sultan’s troops would scour his Christian domains (Serbia and Bulgaria, for example, and the Greek communities of Anatolia), round up thousands of boys between ten and perhaps fifteen years of age, select the strongest and brightest, and carry them off. They would be lodged with Turkish families long enough to learn the language and receive basic instruction in Islam, and then be placed on the bottom rungs of career ladders leading to the most powerful positions in the army and navy, the imperial bureaucracy, and municipal and provincial government. Legally these youngsters remained slaves, but they were slaves with far more opportunities than most of the supposedly free people of the time. Eventually the empire came to be managed mainly by men whose careers had begun with their being stolen from their parents. They could be considered slaves only in the sense of being—like everyone else in the empire—absolutely subject to the will of the sultan.
This system didn’t merely work, it worked brilliantly. The harvesting of children gave the Turks a force of so-called janissaries that was one of the wonders of the age: not only the first large-scale standing army to be seen in Europe since classical times, but the first recognizably modern army. The janissaries were salaried, wore uniforms, lived in barracks, marched in time to music, and were trained to a level of discipline and efficiency that had no equal elsewhere. They also became great innovators, pioneers, for example, in the use of muskets and artillery. (The walls of Constantinople, during the siege that ended in the city’s fall, were reduced to rubble by huge stone balls fired from the Turks’ twenty-six-foot cannons, the doomsday weapons of their time.) What was perhaps most improbable, janissaries were as a rule almost fanatically faithful to their masters. And why not? The most talented and ambitious of them could achieve high rank at an early age and all the good things that success brought with it.
The Turks trafficked in women as well—they would continue to do so into the twentieth century—but the world of their female slaves was vastly more limited than that of the janissaries. The capture of young women was one of the primary objectives of the sultan’s troops when they went plundering, and their raids on foreign territory yielded bountiful supplies of salable flesh. The most attractive girls naturally came into the possession of senior officers, who in turn would pass some of them further up the chain of command until a tiny minority were selected for the sultan’s harem. Thus was perpetuated perhaps the most peculiar characteristic of the Ottoman dynasty: the fact that it was not a family at all in any ordinary sense, but a line of men who had, instead of queens, platoons of women whom they owned and who lived as their pampered prisoners.
Infidelity was made impossible for these women by another famous feature of the sultan’s Topkapi palace: a harem guard force made up of black African slaves who, because their sexual organs had been removed, could not cuckold the monarch. Because Islamic law forbade castration, the Turks purchased these eunuchs as children from such places as Ethiopia, Abyssinia, and Sudan, where slave traders were happy to perform the necessary alterations. The palace also employed white eunuchs drawn from European sources, but these were used in administrative functions rather than as harem guards. Eunuchs, like janissaries, sometimes became the most powerful officials in the empire.
The claustrophobic world of the harem, and the inhabitants’ competition for the attention of the sultan, made it a hotbed of vicious intrigue. The first harem girl to present the sultan with a son, whether before or after he inherited the throne, became by doing so the mother of the imperial heir. This gave her superiority over her harem-mates no matter how lofty their origins—and not a few were daughters of conquered rulers—or how many sons they ultimately produced. The true ruler of the harem, however, was always the sultan’s mother. She was empowered, among other things, to order the execution of her son’s women if she deemed this advisable. She could also, if her son was weak or more interested in self-indulgence than in the duties of his office, become de facto ruler of the empire. Obviously this was a recipe for trouble, producing in every generation a huge supply of surplus younger sons whose frustrated and jealous mothers encouraged their resentments. The results, predictably dire, included rebellion and warfare among the sons of deceased sultans.
Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople and disturber of the peace of Calixtus III, was the son of a sultan who had had to defeat and kill an uncle and a younger brother in order to make himself secure on the throne. Mehmed’s grandfather too had had to fight his own brothers to the death in order to become sultan, his great-grandfather had ordered the strangulation of a younger brother to nip trouble in the bud, and so on back through the generations. This grim history prompted Mehmed to institute a practice that would persist for centuries: whenever a new sultan took the throne, his younger brothers and half-brothers were put to death. As time passed this answer to the succession problem would be refined in grisly ways. It would become customary for the pregnant members of a dead sultan’s harem to be bundled together in sacks and dropped into the sea. The survivors, whether young or old, spent the rest of their lives in celibate confinement.
Mehmed was often a good deal less savage in dealing with his Christian subjects than with his own relatives. As continued conquests caused the Turkish portion of the empire’s population to be numerically overwhelmed by Christians, he found it advantageous to extend a degree of toleration that was unusual for the time but not without cost to the beneficiaries. He heavily taxed the Christians—almost all of them members of the Orthodox rather than the Roman Church—in return for allowing them to retain their clergy. And of course they were expected to submit without question to the Islamic political regime.
The bitter division that separated the Roman and Orthodox churches abetted the Ottomans in expanding their frontiers. It had begun with the unspeakable savagery with which the Fourth Crusade, organized for the purpose of retaking Jerusalem, sacked Constantinople instead and then made it the seat of a short-lived Latin empire. Then came the failure of the West to come to the assistance of the Byzantines when they stood on the brink of destruction, and the willingness of some Western powers to prey on Constantinople themselves. Against this background, and however much it may have baffled and infuriated Calixtus III and others in Rome, it is not really surprising that Orthodox Christians such as the Bulgarians and the Serbs sometimes sided with the Ottoman sultan rather than with the Christian West.
But it is also not surprising, considering the seriousness of the threat, that stopping the advance of the Ottoman Empire into Europe became the defining purpose of Calixtus’s papacy, practically his reason for existing. The first need was for ships—galleys—with which to engage the seagoing forces of the sultan. Naval engineering in the mid-fifteenth century was remarkably unchanged from what it had been two thousand years before. Across all the centuries since the time of Pericles the state-of-the-art warship had remained the trireme, a long, narrow vessel of shallow draft propelled by three banks of oars on each side, as many as 150 oars in all, each powered by a single crewman. In short bursts these galleys could skim forward at great speed, and in all navies the basic tactic was to grapple with enemy vessels, board them, and butcher their crews. The first sailing ships capable of tacking into the wind were still decades in the future, and even after they appeared, galleys would remain dominant in the Mediterranean for another century.
Before he had been in office a month Calixtus was hiring galleys and crews wherever they could be found, asking the Italian powers and the crowned heads of the north to contribute their fleets to the cause, and turning Rome’s Ripa Grande embankment into an enormous bustling shipyard. Craftsmen brought to Rome for the purpose were laying down the keels of all the new galleys for which space could be found. The papal treasury or camera, restored to solvency by Nicholas V, was again emptied to make this possible.Calixtus’s lifestyle, always simple, was now imposed on the Vatican’s entire establishment and staff. Spending for nonmilitary purposes was slashed almost in half, largely by slowing or halting Martin V’s construction projects and reducing the number of scholars and artists employed at the Vatican. The displaced men complained that this was what came of electing a foreign pope, a barbarian of low tastes and rude values, but Calixtus was undeterred. The books in the Vatican library, though not sold off, were stripped of their gold and silver bindings and jeweled adornments. Possessions ranging from country estates to Nicholas’s silver service went on the auction block. Plain earthenware was all that he required, the pope declared. He set May 1, 1456, just under a year off, as the day on which the new fleet would embark, and in the course of that year he spent 150,000 ducats on the preparations.
All the resources of the Vatican were not going to suffice, however. Calixtus dictated appeals to the rich and powerful in every corner of Europe; the pontifical archives contain thirty volumes of these messages, which relays of legates carried to their addressees. Churches everywhere were instructed to ring their bells daily to remind the faithful to pray for the success of the crusade. (This would become the Angelus, the universal and still-practiced ringing of church bells every day at noon.) Tithes were imposed on ecclesiastical revenues, collections were taken up among the laity, and rulers were urged to put aside their disputes and focus on saving Christendom from being overrun. Preachers offered indulgences—release from punishment in the hereafter—to all who contributed the prescribed amounts of support.
The response was rarely what Calixtus hoped. Throughout Europe the very idea of crusades had grown tiresome. The glory of the first crusade more than 350 years earlier, with its expulsion of the Muslims from Jerusalem and the establishment of a Christian kingdom there, had been followed by eight subsequent expeditions that cumulatively produced little except defeat, disgrace, and tragic loss. Two centuries of sacrifice ended not only with the surrender of everything that had been gained in the beginning but with such horrors as the Children’s Crusade (during which thousands of young volunteers disappeared into slavery in the East) and the sacking of Christian Constantinople by invaders from the West.
The crusading ideal had been further degraded by popes who abused it to make war on political enemies close to home. By 1455 such things were a fading memory, but not a happy one. For most Catholic Christians, who had never seen a Turk, the Ottoman conquests in the eastern Mediterranean were remote to the point of seeming not quite real. Outright hostility to the pope’s appeals was rare except in Germany, where resentment lingered about the great sums sent to Rome in the past to pay for crusades that never happened. Not many of the pope’s envoys encountered the kind of anger that erupted when one of their number tried to sell Calixtus’s crusade to a congregation gathered in Cologne Cathedral—he was sent running for his life—but not many were received with enthusiasm either. Stony indifference was the usual reaction.
Nor did Calixtus get what he wanted from the rulers. In England, where King Henry VI had just emerged from one of his bouts of catatonic insanity, the Wars of the Roses were just heating up, and not even many churchmen cared about what was happening in Italy and beyond. Charles VII of France promised thirty warships but then decided to keep them at home for use against the English. The fearsome soldier Francesco Sforza, having made himself master of Milan only a year before, declined even to pretend to be interested in putting either his own skills or the resources of his duchy at the pope’s disposal. Though Venice above all had reason to fear the expanding reach of the Turks, as usual it was pursuing its own priorities in its own arcane ways and was unable to view the other Western powers as potential allies rather than as rivals.
But the odium that today attaches to the word crusade notwithstanding, the danger was clear and present, the need for action urgent. From Constantinople the Turks were pushing deeper into the Balkan peninsula, bearing down on Greece, and impinging upon the sea routes that had long brought wealth to Italy. It is testimony to Calixtus’s understanding of the magnitude of the crisis, and the energy with which he responded despite his feeble health, that he had a first squadron of galleys ready for deployment by September 1455, barely five months after his election. He ordered this squadron to station itself south of Sicily, where its assignment was to intercept any Turkish moves into the western Mediterranean and against Rome while the main fleet was still under construction there. But the entire exercise was turned into a disaster and a humiliation by the squadron’s commander, Pietro Urrea, bishop of Tarragon. Calixtus found himself deluged with complaints that Urrea was operating as nothing better than a pirate, using the vessels entrusted to him to plunder Christian shipping. If Urrea had been selected for command because like Calixtus he was a Spaniard, the pope had made a mistake that would have painful ramifications.
Hope was to be found in one place only—in Naples, whose king, Calixtus’s onetime master Alfonso of Aragon, appeared to be the one happy exception to the indifference and cynicism that pervaded all of Europe. Alfonso not only promised a fleet of galleys but actually assembled one. The pope’s agents reported that this fleet lay at anchor in the Bay of Naples, ready to join the new Roman fleet as soon as it deployed. A hard blow against the Turks seemed possible after all.
Background
IL REGNO—THE KINGDOM
THE FIRST THING TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT NAPLES AND ITS place in the story of the Borgias is that it was not then what it is today. Its name did not stand for a city only—ancient and vibrant and fascinating, but just a city all the same—but for a kingdom covering almost the whole southern half of the Italian peninsula. Until France proved otherwise when a second Borgia pope sat on the throne of St. Peter, Naples was believed to rank among the leading powers not only of Italy but of all Europe.
Its stature is evident in the willingness of no less a figure than Alfonso V, already the ruler of Aragon and a number of the greatest Mediterranean islands including Sicily, to devote much of his life to making himself Alfonso I of Naples as well.
Alfonso was motivated in part by the thought—he was not the first to have it—that possession of Naples would position him for further and greater gains, possibly even mastery of all Italy and the extension of his empire eastward toward Asia. Hence the price he was willing to pay to continue his campaign for Naples, and the risks he was willing to take.
Naples had always been such a great prize that there was nothing remotely unique about the three decades of struggle that culminated in Alfonso’s victory. To the contrary, his long war was only the most recent in an almost uninterrupted series of conflicts that had been soaking southern Italy in blood since the fall of the Roman Empire. Nor could there be anything astonishing, for anyone who knew the Naples story, in the way that Alfonso’s success, rather than leaving him satisfied, inflamed his hunger for more. He was the third Neapolitan king in two centuries not only to want all of Italy but to appear to have a real chance of getting it. The threat that he posed to his neighbors to the north, to Rome and Florence and even faraway Venice and Milan, was a natural function of the power of his new kingdom—or of its perceived power, at any rate. When combined not only with the great island of Sicily but with Alfonso’s other possessions in the Mediterranean, and with his Spanish domains as well, the crown of Naples made him a terrifying force.
It also, not incidentally, gave him one of the world’s oldest and greatest capital cities, the largest in all Europe in the fifteenth century with a population that can only be estimated but was well in excess of a hundred thousand. Naples was so old that its origins were Greek rather than Italian—it began as Neapolis or New City, one of the main strongpoints of the adventurers who colonized southern Italy before the rise of Rome and called it Greater Greece. Over the ensuing millennia Naples had seen not only rulers and dynasties but whole civilizations rise and fade away. It saw no reason to think itself inferior to Italy’s other leading states, Rome included. Its people are not likely to have been greatly impressed with the arrival of the Spaniard Alfonso V, or to have felt particularly honored by his decision to make Naples, rather than Sicily or Corsica or Sardinia or Aragon itself, the capital of his empire. The choice would have seemed merely natural. Neither is it likely that the Neapolitans gave Alfonso much chance of having any more success, or making a more lasting impact, than the kings who had ruled them before him. They had watched them all come, and watched them all go.
In the years following the collapse of the Roman Empire, Naples had fallen into the hands of that branch of the invading northern barbarians known as the Ostrogoths. In the sixth century it became an outpost of Constantinople, in the eighth a duchy subject to the popes in Rome, and in the ninth an independent entity much troubled both by outside enemies and internal contests for power.
In the eleventh century, at nearly the same time the nobles of Normandy were invading England under William the Conqueror, other Norman warriors were moving to southern Italy to take up employment as soldiers for hire. By the twelfth, having awakened to the fact that they were more powerful than their employers, these Normans took control of both Sicily and Naples and joined them in a single kingdom. Their regime became the most impressive in all of western Europe, north or south, with a court unrivaled in culture and magnificence. It was under the Normans, as the historian Benedetto Croce observed, that southern Italy gave rise to “the state as a work of art.”
The Norman kings gave way in the mid-twelfth century to the Hohenstaufen dynasty from Swabia in Germany. Generation after generation, this remarkable family produced such epic figures as Frederick Barbarossa and his grandson Frederick II, called in his own time Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World. These men spent their lives in Sicily and Naples, neglecting their home base in the north, and their rising power brought them into conflict with the popes in Rome. Fear of Frederick II caused Pope Urban IV to invite Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX of France, to come to Italy and take charge of his war with the Hohenstaufen. After a long struggle during which he was excommunicated four times, Frederick was finally bested in battle and politically destroyed. In 1266, after Charles of Anjou finished off the Hohenstaufen by defeating and killing Frederick’s illegitimate son Manfred, Pope Innocent IV crowned him Charles I of Naples.
France and the other future great kingdoms of the north being still backward, fragmented, and weak, Charles’s coronation vaulted him into the first rank of European monarchs. He was able to dictate the outcome of papal elections, and he aspired to more than that. He had acquired Provence through marriage, made himself king of Albania by conquest, and was planning to reconstitute the onetime Latin empire in the eastern Mediterranean when, in 1282, the bloody phenomenon known as the Sicilian Vespers brought his ambitions to an end. This was a plot to expel the Angevins from Sicily, and it turned into a massacre of the island’s French population. By the time Charles died three years later, Sicily had become the property of Aragon in Spain, and he, though still king of Naples, was a spent force.
Though Angevin rule continued through the fourteenth century and nearly half of the fifteenth, it brought nothing but conflict and disorder. Partly because of the legacy of the Norman and German and French invaders, partly too because Naples had no major cities other than its capital and therefore almost no urban middle class, what emerged was a feudal society on the northern European model, one more dominated by hereditary landholding barons than any of the other major Italian states. In all of mainland Italy it was the only state whose ruler had royal status, causing it to become known as Il Regno—The Kingdom. As in the territories near Rome, here too the power of the barons became a chronic source of instability. Charles I’s heirs were barely able to hold together their inheritance and could not have done so without the fisc—the financial tribute that the barons owed to the king as overlord. In the fourteenth century the barons, a wild and unruly lot under any circumstances (Machiavelli would describe them as “men inimical to any kind of civilization”), became completely uncontrollable. The weak rulers of the time had no choice but to grant them repeated concessions and yield to their escalating demands. The result was mayhem on a grand scale and a draining away of Naples’s importance in international affairs.
In 1382 Charles I’s great-great-grandson Charles, who thanks to the dynastic maneuvers of his ancestors was king of Hungary, murdered his much-married but childless cousin Queen Joanna I of Naples and seized her throne. Four years later he was succeeded by his son Ladislas, who needed until the end of the century to consolidate his control and then set about to reestablish Naples as a major power. Though often irresponsible in his management of Il Regno’s internal affairs, selling favors to the barons to raise the money with which to finance his campaigns of conquest, he was relentless in encroaching on his neighbors to the north. The conditions of the time favored his ambitions: this was the period of the Great Schism, so that a weakened papacy was unable to maintain control over its Italian territories, and Milan too had been temporarily enfeebled by the premature death of its duke. Ladislas made himself dominant in central Italy. He might have done so in the north as well if he had not died at age fifty-eight. He had been preparing fresh conquests when his health suddenly failed.
Ladislas’s successor was the climactic Angevin disaster, his sister Joanna II. Like the first Joanna she was childless, and her willingness to hand power over to various lovers contributed to making her two decades on the throne yet another period of violence and confusion. We saw earlier how she made Alfonso of Aragon her heir and invited him to move to Naples and help her fend off her Angevin cousins, then changed course and declared successive Angevins to be her heirs instead, thereby ensuring that her death would be followed by continued war for the crown.
When the popes returned to Rome, it became their policy to do everything possible to keep Naples weak. We have seen how Eugenius IV, in order to secure Aragonese support of his claim to be sole legitimate pope, departed from this policy by recognizing Alfonso as king of Naples.
It was a fair enough trade, justified by the circumstances and offering significant benefits to pope and king alike. But it was also dangerous, and its long-term consequences would be momentous. By granting Naples to a strong, capable, and ambitious king who already ruled much of the western Mediterranean, Eugenius’s recognition of Alfonso made Il Regno as powerful as it had ever been, thus setting the stage for generations of further conflict.