Duchess of Milan (10 page)

“There is no way to make a man regret a wager he has yet to make. But now Il Moro has made his choice,” Isabella said. “And Fortune enjoys no greater delight than when she mocks our choices.”

CHAPTER 6

Chateau du Louvre, Paris, February 1491

“Tenez!”

The Prince of Salerno’s overdone roast capon miraculously took flight, a wheeling, flat trajectory that ended in the middle of the King of France’s bed. The charred, headless fowl, feet still attached and wings spread, lay on the red satin bedcloth like a curious heraldic emblem. Antonello di Sanseverino, the Prince of Salerno, looked down at his suddenly empty pewter dining platter and then with saturnine elegance turned his head toward the King of France. Antonello was almost seventy years old, with white hair swept back from a high forehead darkened by a lifetime in the sun of southern Italy. But his finely modeled features and bullish chest evidenced the hereditary disposition of the Sanseverino men to maintain their good looks and robust health to the end. At a Sanseverino funeral, it was said, the best-looking man present was always the corpse.

“When I say
‘Tenez,’
it means I intend to put the ball into play,
monseigneur.
I do hope you haven’t taken affront.” His Most Christian Majesty Charles VIII of France held up his tennis racket and apologetically shrugged his shoulders, which would have been virtually nonexistent if not for the copious padding of his pink velvet coat.

“Well, Your Majesty, if you were aiming at my capon, you can congratulate yourself on a very fine ball indeed.”

Charles emitted a brief noise like an irate goose, which he might have extended into the honking of an entire gaggle if he had found Prince Antonello’s jest truly amusing. The King walked toward the bed, displaying spindly, childlike legs adorned with fashionable nine-color hose, and feet enlarged to absurd proportions by the latest style in French slippers, which featured enormous, scallop-shaped splayed toes. A humped back echoed the contour of his bulging stomach, his head was oversize, his huge eyes vague and watery, his nose an enormous bony protrusion. His coarse red beard grew up into his nostrils and down his neck but refused to cover his pale cheeks and collapsing chin.

This collection of anatomical misfortunes sat on the edge of his bed, joining his mistress of the week--a Parisian prostitute wearing, as Antonello observed to himself, the kind of tastelessly anachronistic costume that many Frenchwomen still favored: sleeves as big as tents and linen headpieces that rose up like horns and trailed wisps of silk tissue. Antonello glanced at the strumpet long enough to see His Majesty’s hand disappear into her billowing skirts. The prostitute giggled, and Antonello looked out the window, motivated by boredom rather than modesty--the King had already shown him pictures of the strumpet naked, in a pose that invited intercourse
d’arriere;
His Most Christian Majesty kept several artists busy making such drawings of all his conquests.

A freight barge covered with dirty brown canvas drifted by on the Seine, which was itself stained a dingy color by sewage and the sullen sky. Across the river, dozens of jagged medieval towers raked the mist, their copper spires, topped with crucifixes and weathercocks, jutting like the lances of a vast army. Paris is an ugly city, Antonello reflected, with an ugly climate, in an ugly country peopled with filthy
oltramontani
barbarians who disdain bathing as earnestly as they repudiate learning. The previous month he had gone to Amboise with the King, and they had encountered perhaps a thousand homeless peasants on the road, pathetic wretches who owned nothing but brown canvas sacks to cover their torsos and counted themselves lucky if they got a scrap of brown bread twice a week. It had been raining that day, and the road was awash with mud the color of excrement, mud that covered the bare limbs of the peasants to match the filthy hue of their sackcloths, and they had all looked like walking
caca,
two-legged turds sloshing through the sewer that was France. . . . To be in Naples this day, Antonello mused, with the bay the color of Eleonora of Aragon’s eyes and the lemon trees climbing the hills ... I would give my soul to be in Naples this day.

Antonello stood up; he was so tall that the brass columns of the King’s bed were level with his nose. “Your Majesty, it has just occurred to me that you have made the emblem of the German Emperor.” He pointed to the charred capon, which indeed looked like a headless, distorted version of the black imperial eagle that was the symbol of the ancient Holy Roman Empire, now neither holy nor Roman and usually referred to simply as Germany.

“Remarkable.” His Most Christian Majesty withdrew his arm from his mistress’s skirts and sprang to his feet. He stood over the capon, his lips slack and his nose jutting, as if he were examining the talking head of a decapitated saint. “You see what it is I have made, my good Prince: I have created a portent! I verily have! It is indeed a portent! It will lead forth our Christian multitude against the heathen Turk, to free Constantinople from the Sultan’s yoke! O Roland and Olivier, rise and live again, most Christian knights! The murdering paynim awaits our holy vengeance!” Charles whirled as if brandishing a sword, then stopped suddenly. “I’m not certain I want this to be my portent,” he said. “It is, after all,
his
emblem.” Charles was referring to Maximilian, Archduke of Austria and imminent heir to his ailing father’s title of Holy Roman Emperor. As far as Charles was concerned, only the presence of Maximilian and his German hordes lurking at France’s borders prevented him from leading the French army on the last great Crusade.

“I think what it means, Your Majesty, is that you will soon have the Germans on a spit.”

“Yes. Of course. And then we shall be free for our Christian enterprise!” Charles searched frantically about the room--the floor was littered with tennis rackets, whips, swords, arrows, arquebuses--until he located one of his ponderous jousting lances. “We shall ride with all the great paladins of Christendom!” Charles shouted as he prepared his charge. He lunged at the bed and expertly speared the capon.

“Well, it appears you are already halfway to Constantinople, Your Majesty. But of course you must take Naples first. It will be your leaping-off point for the Turk strongholds. Would you like to see the maps?”

“The maps? Yes, yes, the maps.”

With a casual motion of his massive arm, Antonello swept the pewter platter to the floor. He unrolled two parchments over the tabletop. One was a map of Naples, the other a more detailed plan of the Castel Nuovo, the city’s enormous, impregnable seaside fortress. Antonello did not need to remind Charles of their mutual interest in the third great city of Europe, surpassed in size and wealth, if not in magnificence or sophistication, by only Venice and Milan. The French King had inherited his nation’s half-century-old grudge against the house of Aragon, which had snatched Naples away from France, while Prince Antonello had a more recent score to settle with Ferrante of Aragon, the current King of Naples, who had driven Antonello into exile and confiscated his vast landholdings in southern Italy.

Charles made admiring hums over the invasion plans, and Antonello could not help but reflect that when His Most Christian Majesty stood over a campaign map, he was a titan of sorts. For the same taxes that had reduced France to a stinking sewer of a nation had built the most magnificent military machine in Europe: a standing army, available at a moment, its loyalty unquestioned--unlike the mercenary bands the Italian princes employed--a standing army of elite cavalry and trained infantry and, most important of all, cannons. The French could scarcely make edible bread, but they could cast cannons as if they commanded the forge of Vulcan. Cannons light enough to be brought over the Alps, yet powerful enough to bring down the walls of even the Castel Nuovo in Naples. Antonello believed that the French cannons would change the map of Europe. And he intended to be a beneficiary of those changes.

“Monseigneurs.”
The voice was brisk and somewhat shrill. Charles dropped his jousting lance with a loud clang; the impaled capon carcass fell from the tip. Antonello hastily rolled up his maps.

The woman who breezed into the room with implacable authority was a bit taller than the King and dressed in the restrained new Italian style: a black silk dress with narrow sleeves and contrasting square-necked bodice in white velvet. Her hair was pulled back from her forehead to reveal a sharp widow’s peak, then hidden by a black hoodlike cap hemmed with double rows of pearls. Her slender, sour face featured a rapier nose so sparely fleshed that it appeared to be bare bone; her full lips were shaped into a habitual pucker of anxiety. Despite her tailored dress, one would have had to look carefully to discern that she was in the sixth month of her pregnancy.

“Madame,” Prince Antonello said. He stood and bowed deeply. Anne, Madame de Beaujeu, or simply “Madame,” as she was known throughout France, scrutinized the
mis-en-scene
with cynical, piercing eyes. When her father, King Louis XI, died eight years previously, Madame had ruthlessly wrested from her own mother, Charlotte of Savoy, the title of regent to her then thirteen-year-old brother. Madame’s prize had been the virtual corpse of a nation, and yet against all odds she had nursed France back to life, shuttling that splendid army (her father’s only legacy of any real value) from one end of the country to another, bludgeoning one fractious feudal lord or rebellious province after another into obedience.

Madame dismissed Antonello with a quick redirection of her icy gaze; while his Naples “campaign” might inflame those idlers at court who read old-fashioned tales of chivalry and dreamed of grandiose conquests--her brother the King being the foremost example--it might also provide her leverage someday in negotiating with the Italians, so she tolerated Antonello’s presence.
“Monseigneur,”
she said to her brother, “I have a letter from Il Moro.”

“Il Moro! Il Moro! II Moro!” Charles whined; a large drop of mucus fell from his nose. “Truly! All I hear every day from the ambassadors is Il Moro. From the Venetian ambassador and the Roman ambassador and this gentleman from Naples, nothing but Il Moro! Even the English go on about him! Truly! Why must everything be Il Moro!”

“Because,
monseigneur,
Il Moro has succeeded in consummating his alliance with the house of Este in Ferrara and is now in a position to unite all Italy into a common polity. It is my concern to establish whether Il Moro will then bring Italy into an alliance with us against the Germans or join the Germans and oppose us.” Madame whipped her head to confront Prince Antonello. “You are familiar with events at the court of Milan. How would you assess Il Moro’s intentions,
monseigneur?”
Actually Madame knew everything that Antonello did, because although Antonello’s nephew Galeazzo di Sanseverino was Captain General of the Armies of Milan, Madame had been intercepting all of Galeazz’s letters to his uncle, none of which had revealed any state secrets. Still, there was the possibility that Galeazz used a code.

“When it comes to concealing his intentions, no man is more skilled than Il Moro.” Antonello smiled sardonically.

Madame lifted her heavy, already high and inquisitive eyebrows. “Il Moro has written us to ask that my brother agree to the investiture of the Duke of Milan with the privileges of the Duchy of Genoa.” Madame’s puckered lips relaxed slightly, wryly. “Curious, is it not, Monseigneur Antonello, that when Il Moro asks a single question, a dozen answers are required? With this request Il Moro warns me that he could as easily turn to the German Emperor and ask for his nephew’s formal investiture with the privileges of Milan, which is an imperial fief. Perhaps he intends to do so even if I agree. Or perhaps he sincerely desires our friendship and intends to solicit our help in crushing Naples should he wish to usurp his nephew. And with that done, then Il Moro might invite the German Emperor to invest
him
as the new Duke of Milan, turn all Italy against our army while it was still occupied in Naples, while at the same time the Germans marched into Paris. Or perhaps Il Moro merely intends to wage peace on Europe and use his considerable treasury to configure the map to his liking.” She paused and her dour eyes flickered. “The real question is not to what extent II Moro intends to deceive us but to what extent Il Moro wishes to deceive himself.

“Monseigneur,
I intend to deliberate upon this matter at greater length,” Madame said, snapping her gaze back to her bewildered brother. “When I have drafted a reply to Il Moro, I will of course expect you to sign it.” With that Madame abruptly turned and exited the room.

His Most Christian Majesty retrieved his lance and desultorily poked at the capon carcass. Finally he looked up morosely at Prince Antonello. “Perhaps we can interest Il Moro in our Crusade,” he mumbled, then shuffled back to his bed and placed his oversize head facedown in his mistress’s lap.

CHAPTER 7

Extract of a letter of Polissena Romei, matron of honor to the Duchess of Bari, to Eleonora d’Este, Duchess of Ferrara. Milan, 2 March 1491

. . . her husband accords her the utmost cordiality and good will, and no effort has been spared to provide her with amusements and pleasures. Today Messer Galeazz has taken her fishing to Cussago. . . . One does not hear the end of the accolades devoted to your daughter’s horsemanship, Your Highness. . . .

Extract of a letter of Giacomo Trotti, Ferrarese ambassador to the Court of Milan, to Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. Milan, 10 March 1491

... on the occasions on which he visits the Gallerani woman in her rooms, he proceeds there as brazenly as if he were progressing to the Duomo on Easter Sunday. The situation is manageable at present, but I have grave concerns about what may ensue once the child is born. I suspect that Il Moro intends to have his bastard christened publicly and upon that occasion acknowledge the child as his own. The possibility also exists that your daughter will create an incident in the general view. While she at times appears melancholic, her eruptions of temper are sudden and violent. She has bruised poor Fritello, her dwarf. The company of Il Moro’s daughter relieves her despondency, but the girl is too frail to ride or accompany Madonna Beatrice on her many excursions. The Duke and Duchess of Milan have been in Pavia since early February, but Madonna Beatrice is going there tomorrow. We can expect no cordiality in those relations, either. . . .