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During the years when an increasingly feeble Calixtus III was bringing unexpected vigor to meeting the Turkish threat, managing a Church that was the largest and by far the most complex institution in Europe, and struggling to cope with the never-ending schemes and squabbles of strongmen far and near, another and more personal dimension of his life was becoming burdensome as well.
This was his relationship with his family, which in addition to being numerous and eager for advancement had become binational as more and more of its members left Spain for Rome to see what advantage could be wrung from having a relative who was first a cardinal and then—miracle of miracles—the supreme pontiff.
We don’t know how many Borgias were in Italy during Calixtus’s reign, only that their demands for favors provoked him to complain. But he complained too of relatives who had not left Spain at all, instead remaining there while appealing for help in achieving a lifestyle appropriate to a family whose name he had made grand. Among the stay-at-homes was his sister Isabella, who as a young woman had married their kinsman Don Jofrè de Borja, son of a wealthier branch of the family with better connections to the aristocracy. This Jofrè had died in 1437, leaving Isabella with a family of at least two sons and four daughters, possibly more. By that time Alonso was bishop of Valencia and living in Italy in the service of Alfonso V. He permitted Isabella to move with her brood into Valencia’s episcopal palace, which put her on a level with the city’s proudest families.
In terms of bloodline, Isabella’s children stood above their mother and her brother the cardinal. Their paternal grandmother, Don Jofrè’s mother, was a child of the de Oms family, which occupied a higher perch in the Valencian nobility than any of the Borjas. It was partly because of his marriage to Sibila de Oms that Jofrè’s father, Rodrigo Gil de Borja, had risen to be chief counselor of Játiva and a member of the court of King Pedro of Aragon. Isabella’s marriage to Jofrè had been a significant step up, and Alonso always took an interest in her children. He saw to it that advantageous marriages were arranged for the daughters and that the sons were provided with the kinds of educations and connections that could get young careers off to a fast start. Alonso had another sister, Catalina, who had made a good marriage to the Valencian baron Juan del Milà, and he was generous with assistance to their numerous progeny as well.
Several of Alonso’s nephews and cousins, Isabella’s son Rodrigo and Catalina’s Luis Juan del Milà among them, were steered toward careers in the Church. This was customary because practical: it was in the ecclesiastical field that an uncle who was first a bishop and then a cardinal could be most helpful. Vatican records show Rodrigo and Luis Juan being singled out, as early as the reign of Eugenius IV, for benefices, offices generating ecclesiastical income, that would have been unimaginable without the intervention of a patron who had access to the pope’s ear and the king of Aragon’s as well. We see Rodrigo, still no more than a schoolboy, becoming the recipient of ecclesiastical revenues first from his hometown of Játiva, then from the cathedral of Barcelona, and finally from the cathedral of Valencia. In 1449, when Rodrigo was about eighteen and his uncle was in his fifth year as a cardinal resident in Rome, Pope Nicholas V issued a bull allowing him—in contravention of the rules, which is why a bull was necessary—to keep his benefices (all of which were in Spain) even if he resided at a university or in Italy. This cleared the way for the youth to leave Spain for study at one of the great universities of Italy without sacrificing the income that permitted him to live in the style of a young lord—a cardinal’s nephew. Again there was nothing scandalous, even unusual, about any of this. Everything known about Rodrigo makes it reasonable to suppose that he was both an able student—not even his enemies would ever deny his intelligence—and a conscientious one, consistent hard work being one of his defining characteristics throughout his life.
Rodrigo thus spent the next six years in Italy, along with his brother Pedro Luis and their cousin del Milà, but little is known of their lives. Rodrigo and del Milà were almost certainly studying law at the University of Bologna, and in 1453 the latter, who was probably the elder of the two by a few years, was given the bishopric of Segorbe in Spain although still short of the required canonical age of twenty-seven. Two years later, when Alonso became pope, the nephews, in their mid-twenties now, found their lives dramatically transformed. On May 10, 1455, just twenty days after his coronation, Calixtus appointed all three to positions of importance. Rodrigo was given the high office of protonotary apostolic, with duties appropriate to his legal training. Bishop Luis Juan del Milà became papal legate, representative, in the great city of Bologna, a fief of the papacy. Pedro Luis Borgia, the trio’s sole non-churchman, took command of the Castel Sant’Angelo, the massive and ancient circular fortress that stood on the bank of the River Tiber overlooking the Vatican. This was no mere honorary appointment. The Castel, thirteen hundred years old, was an impregnable stronghold and the cornerstone of papal security in Rome. As its governor and commander of its troops, Pedro Luis became a power in the city and a potential adversary of the baronial clans, the Orsini and Colonna and others, whose unruly behavior kept Rome endlessly on the verge of violent disorder.
Upon receiving these promotions Rodrigo and Luis Juan returned to Bologna, where the latter took up his duties as legate and the former returned to his studies, completing his doctorate in the autumn of 1456. Before that happened, there had come a flurry of further and even more significant appointments. On February 20, in consistory, Calixtus announced his first three appointments to the Sacred College: his two clerical nephews and, as part of his efforts to win support for the campaign against the Turks, a twenty-two-year-old member of the Portuguese royal family who was also a nephew of Alfonso V. It would later be said that several cardinals objected to the elevation of such young men to such high positions, but in fact there is no contemporary evidence of any such reaction—none provided by anyone in a position to know, certainly. The scholarly diplomat Enea Silvio Piccolomini, a respected figure and destined to become pope himself, wrote at the time that “Cardinal Rodrigo is young, it is true, but his conduct and good sense add years to his age.” Every cardinal present signed the bull of appointment. By the time the promotions were made public, Calixtus had also named Pedro Luis Borgia captain-general, commanding officer, of the papal army.
These actions, though obviously nepotistic, raised no eyebrows. Such things were not only accepted but expected—Nicholas V had been the exception rather than the rule—and the reasons for them were clear. Calixtus, still new in office, was surrounded by the same men who had assented to his election only because their own choices had been blocked, and they expected him to do nothing while waiting quietly for his own death. These were hardened veterans of the Vatican’s political wars, cynical and self-serving, and to a man they were professing to be the pontiff’s best friends while pushing for the advancement of their own agendas and the thwarting of their rivals. At the center of this tangle of hypocrisy and intrigue, isolated and probably lonely, Calixtus faced immense problems and was in urgent need of deputies he could trust. There were such men among the cardinals who elected him—the Greek Bessarion, the Spaniard Carvajal—and he took them into his confidence. But he needed others too, and he was far from being the first pope to look to his own family. Not even the Orsini or the Colonna could complain when he did so.
Especially not the Orsini or the Colonna. Both families owed much of their wealth and power to the success of their ancestors in capturing and exploiting the papal crown. And they must have understood that not only Calixtus but the Church itself was fortunate that he had capable and responsible young nephews to place in the Sacred College. As for the appointment of Pedro Luis as captain-general, if it is not excused it is certainly explained by the treachery of the previous incumbent, Giovanni Ventimiglia, who at Siena had snatched defeat from the jaws of what should have been an important papal victory by arranging to have himself taken prisoner by a beaten foe. Beyond that, the promotion is most fairly judged on the basis of Pedro Luis’s subsequent performance in office.
Calixtus’s elevation of his young nephews reflects his determination, once a campaign against the Turks had been set in motion, to attack other problems as well. Foremost among his other problems were the Papal States, those huge expanses of the Italian landscape that the Church had begun accumulating in the time of the Emperor Constantine but by the dawning of the Renaissance were in the hands of an assortment of warlords and petty despots, few of whom were willing to acknowledge, much less yield to, the authority of Rome. The city-states ruled by these despots and warlords spread across a great part of northern and central Italy. At their core was the thousand-year-old duchy of Rome, which extended from the border with Naples northward into Tuscany, but they also included the Romagna and the March of Ancona on the Adriatic coast, the province of Umbria between the March and Tuscany, the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, the former papal capital of Avignon in what is now France, parts of Corsica, and a long list of scattered cities and towns. All this might have been a source of immense wealth and power for the papacy, but it had rarely been anything of the kind. By the ninth century, barely a hundred years after its possession by the popes had been confirmed by Pepin king of the Franks and reconfirmed by his son Charlemagne, virtually the whole inheritance was completely out of control. And things went downhill from there, reaching their nadir in the fourteenth century when the popes were in exile and the warlords were left free to do as they pleased. By the time of Calixtus the lawlessness of the Papal States and the brutality of their rulers were accepted as normal almost everywhere except inside the Vatican. In determining to put things right, to begin the process of restoring order, Calixtus was challenging some of the most murderously dangerous families in Italy. No one could have been surprised that, in selecting lieutenants to whom he could entrust this domestic crusade, he looked to his sisters’ sons.
The appointment of Luis Juan del Milà as legate to Bologna made sense as an early step. Ancient and rich, more important than any northern city except Milan and Venice, Bologna had for centuries been a papal fief and therefore subject, in theory, to the temporal authority of Rome. In practice, the families that made up its ruling oligarchy had long since grown accustomed to being accountable to no one, and naturally they had no interest in submitting to Rome. As legate, armed with instructions from his uncle to reassert Rome’s authority, the young Cardinal del Milà was undertaking an assignment that would have been a challenge for the most gifted and experienced of Vatican diplomats. Calixtus, aware that he had no time to spare, was teaching his nephew to swim by throwing him into deep water.
He did much the same with the Borgia brothers, and for them the waters were deeper and more treacherous. Pedro Luis was instructed to muster the pope’s troops and lead them into the hill country immediately north and west of Rome, territory that had been the property of the Church since before the fall of the Roman Empire but that generations of Orsini had learned to think of as theirs alone. There he was to assert his uncle’s lordship and deal with the resistance that such a claim was certain to provoke. He would be making war not only on the Orsini but also, by unmistakable implication, their patron and semi-secret partner, Alfonso of Aragon and Naples. It would have been a daunting assignment for the best general in Italy.
Cardinal Rodrigo’s turn came on the last day of 1456, when Calixtus signed a bull appointing him vicar general in matters temporal—matters pertaining to civil governance—in the March of Ancona. Roughly a hundred miles north of Rome on the eastern side of the Apennine Mountains that run down the Italian peninsula like a high ragged spine, the March was not as wild and lawless a part of the Papal States as the Romagna, which lay immediately to its north, but it was wild and lawless enough. It too had long been beyond the reach of papal power and ravaged by the endless petty wars of the local strongmen. Early in his career the brilliant mercenary Francesco Sforza had won control of much of it. Later, when Sforza’s ambitions sent him northward to the far greater prize of Milan, he left pieces of the March in the hands of various members of his family. Alfonso V, always happy to trouble any waters in which he saw the possibility of profitable fishing, later and rather brazenly proposed that Calixtus turn the whole province over to him. In his sixties by this point, a monarch of international importance for nearly half a century, Alfonso had developed such a massive ego that he was able to regard this suggestion as reasonable or at least feasible. He had also probably not entirely stopped hoping that his onetime faithful servant Alonso de Borja would prove willing to do his bidding. The pope, however, was insulted and alarmed. If the March were not brought back under Roman control, he concluded, it might soon be lost forever.
Calixtus was prodded into action not only by Alfonso’s presumption but by reports of what was happening in the March town of Ascola (Ascoli Piceno today). A young nobleman known to history only as Josias had murdered the town’s resident tyrant, one Giovanni Sforza (whose place in the large tangled family of that name is not clear). After trying to take over as tyrant himself and being expelled by the citizenry, this Josias seized the local rocca or fortress—the property, as it happened, of the papacy—and began using it as a base from which to prey on the neighborhood as head of a gang of bandits. When Josias’s victims appealed for help to their overlord in the Vatican, Calixtus decided that the time had come to intervene. The job of managing the intervention was going to be immensely complex, with prickly political, diplomatic, and military dimensions. In giving it to the untested young Cardinal Rodrigo, the pope was taking yet another huge risk.
What followed was an early demonstration of Rodrigo’s precocious competence. The failed tyrant Josias was soon a failed bandit chieftain as well, a prisoner on his way to Rome. The people of Ascola found themselves under an administration more rational and benign than anyone then living in the area had ever experienced. As the cardinal extended his control and his reforms into other parts of the March, he became a popular figure, celebrated as a liberator. His uncle, in sending him north, had equipped him with extraordinary powers, not least with respect to bringing the region’s churchmen under control. He had the authority to bestow any benefice upon any recipient of his choice and also—what could be very useful in bringing ecclesiastical practice into alignment with the needs and realities of the hour—to accept the surrender of benefices. During almost a year in the March he threaded his way through a maze of difficulties, and there is no record of his putting a foot wrong.
His one unsolvable problem was money. It was expected at this time, in Europe generally, that a churchman in a role of secular administration like Rodrigo’s would pay his own expenses. This was a justification for the heaping of multiple benefices upon senior clergy: in many cases it was not only the simplest but almost the only way of providing a ruler’s senior lieutenants with the revenues they needed to be effective. A famous example is Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who for many years ran the government, the foreign policy, and the Church in England under his master Henry VIII and was able to do so on the grandest scale thanks entirely to the enormous revenues generated by his ecclesiastical offices. Those revenues paid not only for Wolsey’s lavish lifestyle but for the sprawling bureaucracies he headed. The income of the crown itself, at the time, could not have sufficed even to provide Wolsey and his fellow ministers with satisfactory salaries. It was the same in France, in Spain, and elsewhere and is one of the reasons (education being another) why bishops, archbishops, and cardinals were so often top government officers. Their benefices made it unnecessary for the monarchs to pay them—at least in any direct way.
Rodrigo, however, soon found the costs of bringing new management to the March beyond his ability to pay. His uncle, in financial extremis himself, tried to help in the only way he could: by appointing Rodrigo to the vacant bishopric of Girona in the northeastern corner of Spain, thereby opening up an additional stream of income. Even this, however, proved to be insufficient.
We will see this sort of thing happening again, and it is something to be taken into account when considering the accusations of greed that have always been directed at Rodrigo. While his income did rise in time to stunning levels, it ceases to seem quite so disgraceful when measured against his expanding responsibilities, the expenses that they entailed, and the need for him to pay most of the bills himself. Throughout most of his life his income would not be his, strictly speaking, but that of the sectors of the Vatican machinery it was his duty to operate.
During the nine or ten months that he spent in the March, his financial situation was dire. He found it necessary, in order to carry out the mission on which his uncle had sent him, to mortgage—borrow against—his entire projected income for the next three years.
Worrisome as such problems were, however, they sank into insignificance when orders reached the March for Rodrigo to return to Rome, because he was again being promoted.
Background
THE MEN IN THE RED HATS
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE COLLEGE OF CARDINALS IN THE STORY of the Borgias—the fact that if Alonso had not been made a cardinal, he would never have moved to Rome and certainly could never have been elected pope—raises the question of what exactly a cardinal was in those days, and how it was that becoming one mattered so much.
The short answer is that, as the fifteenth century advanced and the popes reestablished themselves in Rome, the cardinals became a kind of papal royal family—“princes of the church.” They lived lives of extraordinary privilege, with unique access to power and splendid sources of income. All of which added to the allure of membership in the tiny group that elected the pope and from which new popes were invariably chosen. It also helps to explain why the most powerful families in Italy came to regard it as essential always to be represented in the college.
Like the papacy itself, like the Church generally, the college was a long time evolving. The first cardinals, when they appeared in the fifth century, were not princes in any sense but simply the chief priests of Rome’s parish churches. Their name was derived from the Latin cardo, which means “hinge” and indicated that cardinals were the main point of connection between the bishop of Rome—il papa—and the people. A century later these cardinal-priests were joined by a new group of cardinal-deacons (deacons being clerics but not ordained priests and therefore not empowered to say mass) with their own distinct responsibilities. After another two hundred years cardinal-bishops appeared as well. This newest group, being made up of men of higher rank than the others, was the most prestigious but had no more power or authority.
In the eleventh century the three groups, each of which had functioned separately under its own elected dean, increased their clout by combining into a single body, the Sacred College. It established its own small bureaucracy, assumed responsibility for the management of papal elections (though not yet for actually doing the electing), and secured for its members all the top positions in the Curia, the papal administrative machinery. In such ways it gave itself a foundation from which it would become capable of challenging the authority of the popes. In the 1170s, when the election of a six-year-old Holy Roman emperor made it transparently absurd for emperors to choose popes, the Third Lateran Council handed the entire process over to the Sacred College, where it has remained to this day. The years following saw the emergence of the consistory: pope and college meeting together as a governing council. The galero, a wide-brimmed red hat with tassels, had become the sign of membership in the college.
The rivalry between popes and councils that shaped the career of Alonso de Borja was paralleled by a similar contest between the papacy and the Sacred College. This was, essentially, a struggle to determine whether the Church was going to be a nonhereditary monarchy, ruled by a single supreme leader, or an oligarchy governed by the men with red hats. Both the Babylonian Captivity and the Western Schism happened in large part because of the refusal of the college to accept the pope as monarch. More than a few cardinals showed themselves willing to split the Church, if necessary, to reduce the pontiff to a figurehead.
As early as 1352, the cardinals’ distrust of papal power introduced yet another new element into the selection of popes. This was the “capitulation,” a promise to which all participating cardinals were expected to subscribe before voting. Many elections came to be preceded by the drafting and adoption of long lists of capitulations. Typically, the cardinals pledged that if elected they would not do certain things: dilute the power of their colleagues by increasing the size of the college, appoint new cardinals without approval of two-thirds of the membership, imprison any cardinal without unanimous approval, or appoint relatives to certain important positions. Such promises figured conspicuously in conclaves throughout the Western Schism and beyond, but the results were practically nil. New popes consistently ignored them, making use of the many ways they had of making their former colleagues dependent upon them for money, for appointment to coveted positions, for any number of things.
Appointment to the college remained a great prize all the same and attracted the interest of even the greatest of kings. Inevitably in a world where noble and even royal families consigned children to careers in the Church for political purposes, the red hat could become the penultimate goal (the pontifical throne being the ultimate one) for power-hungry, greedy men with no interest at all in the religious life. In a Church whose supreme head doubled as the monarch of one of Italy’s most important states—a state that was, inevitably, sometimes in conflict with its neighbors—cardinals who knew how to make war could be worth their weight in holy relics. Thus in the fourteenth century, when Pope Innocent VI wanted to return from Avignon but didn’t dare do so before clearing Rome and the adjacent territory of the ruffians who had taken control, the man he chose for the job was Cardinal Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz, archbishop of Toledo. He proved a good choice. A veteran of Spain’s wars against the Moors, Albornoz took Rome back from the bandit who had established himself as tyrant there and not only subdued most of the Papal States but imposed on them a constitution that would remain in effect into the nineteenth century. It was only his sudden death, and the unraveling of his gains, that obliged the pope to forget about a triumphal return to Rome.
Albornoz’s successor was another warrior-cardinal, one who if not his equal as a general or administrator definitely surpassed him in savagery. Like Albornoz of royal blood (he was a cousin of the king of France), Robert of Geneva came to be known as the “butcher of Cesena” for allowing some four thousand of that little city’s citizens to be slaughtered in retribution for a rebellion. This, however, did not prevent his being elected the first antipope of the Western Schism (again in contrast to Albornoz, who at the pinnacle of his career refused the papal crown). His reign as Clement VII was undistinguished but free of further atrocities. Mainly he confined himself to selling ecclesiastical offices and doing the bidding of the French crown.
He was not the last of the fighting cardinals, but from the time of the popes’ return to Rome they were a disappearing breed. Gradually the Sacred College was domesticated, its members abandoning the idea of becoming at least equal to the pope and accepting high status in compensation. This new status would become official in the 1460s when the pope of the time, Paul II, conferred on all cardinals the official rank of prince, so that they were recognized across Europe as equal to dukes in the feudal hierarchy and inferior only to the pope and his fellow crowned heads. Thenceforth they would dress in resplendent red robes and be the star performers in a whole new theater of pomp and circumstance. They were not to appear in public except “in state,” accompanied by as many as three hundred uniformed attendants.
But they were never just puppets in a meaningless bigger-than-life play. They sat with the pope in consistory and so had the opportunity to influence important decisions. Most of them had charge of at least one of the Vatican’s numerous courts, which dealt with cases from every corner of Europe. They also directed the Curia’s most important departments; high rank, good education, and lofty family connections made them useful as diplomats; and they were often employed as legates and governors in the Papal States. Rulers throughout Europe found it advantageous to employ cardinals as advisers or petitioners when favors were wanted from Rome, and often put them on retainer.
For all these reasons the Sacred College became a hotbed of political and diplomatic intrigue, especially for the states of Italy as they maneuvered for advantage. This was never more true than when the cardinals gathered to elect a new pope; many arrived as agents of whatever secular state had secured their appointment in the first place and were expected to support candidates not unfriendly to that state or even—the best of all possible outcomes—its native sons. History is a trickster, though, and it mocks the best-laid plans. Thus Alonso Borgia was elected precisely because, during his decade in Rome, he had refused to become a player in the politics of the Vatican. It was by becoming the least visible and least feared of cardinals, ironically, that he turned himself into the man of the hour. He was, however, one of those exceptions that prove a rule. The rule in this case was the unsurprising fact that success both in college and in conclave required skill, strength, and clear, practical goals.
Perhaps the most surprising development of the fifteenth century was the way in which the College of Cardinals gradually became less, rather than more, international. Of the fifteen cardinals at the conclave that elected Alonso Borgia, seven were Italian. Thirty-seven years later, when another conclave elected a second Borgia pope, twenty-three cardinals participated, but only two were not Italian. The Italians had taken over in part because their most powerful families, the rulers of the peninsula’s leading states, had more at stake than their counterparts in more distant places. It had come to seem essential, in the interim between the two elections, that every princely house in Italy not only be represented in the college but place one of its own sons there. It was taken for granted that the college could never be without a Sforza from Milan, a Medici from Florence, an Este from Ferrara, a Gonzaga from Mantua, and an Orsini and a Colonna from Rome and its environs. Among the things demanded of cardinals was, above all, that they live in princely fashion—that they expend their wealth on the construction and adornment of great palaces, the building or rebuilding of the churches and piazzas of Rome, and the recruitment of artists and artisans capable of carrying out such work at the highest level of perfection. Thus could they contribute to fulfilling the dream that Martin V had for Rome when he returned the papacy from its long exile in 1420: that it would again become the glory of the world, a monument in stone to the greatness of the Church.
That contradictions lay embedded in all this could go without saying. To recruit cardinals from the richest and most powerful families in Italy, to make them both the political instruments of their houses and Rome’s new royalty—these things were easily accomplished. But that these same men should also function as religious leaders, as models of rectitude—that was expecting too much.
This whole line of discussion inevitably gives rise to questions about the moral standards of the cardinals and other clergy—their sexual behavior in particular—in the fifteenth century. Salacious anecdotes are available in abundance and in a vast array of sources. What is less easy is to determine how meaningful these anecdotes are, how typical of the cardinals, bishops, and priests of the time, and even how true. Alonso Borgia was elected pope 332 years after the First Lateran Council settled a thousand-year debate about clerical celibacy by making it mandatory throughout the Western Church. All clergy thenceforth took vows of chastity. In a milieu where many positions of leadership were held by men who had been assigned to ecclesiastical careers for political and dynastic reasons and where much of the clerical rank and file was without education or training, it is hardly surprising if lapses were commonplace. Complaints about lapses were likewise not rare and came, as often as not, from the clergy itself. The only valid generalization, probably, is that exemplary behavior and gross misbehavior were to be found almost anywhere one looked, and that the College of Cardinals itself was rich in saints and sinners.
The complex ironies of the situation are encapsulated in what Ludovico Gonzaga, marquess of the city-state of Mantua, told his son in 1460:
“Although you are a cardinal, be religious.”