The Borgias (10 page)

It is likely that much of Europe owed its safety and survival, at this juncture, to what was happening in the East. The regions where Roman Christianity gave way to the Orthodox faith became the setting for exploits of an epic character. Though most Italians paid little attention, great things were accomplished decade after decade and made an immense and lasting difference. One of the most brilliant of the heroes was Stephen III, who in 1457 at age twenty-four was crowned prince of Moldavia in what is now Romania and immediately launched into a career that over the next forty-seven years would see him defeat one invasion after another by various, always numerically superior, enemies. He won forty-six of his forty-eight battles, repelling a lifelong series of Turkish attacks while also having to fight off the attempts of his Roman Catholic neighbors, Hungary and Poland in particular, to take possession of his homeland. Somehow he managed to improve the
prosperity and enrich the cultural life of Moldavia in the midst of endless peril, and after his death he would be canonized a saint by the Orthodox Church.

Better remembered today, for macabre and not entirely imaginary reasons, was Vlad III of Wallachia, like Moldavia an independent principality in the fifteenth century and today part of Romania. Known even in his own time as Dracula (son of the dragon), and to the Turks as “the impaler prince” for his favored method of dispatching enemies, he became
voivode
or ruler of Wallachia a year before Stephen took charge of Moldavia and was about the same age. Despite his lurid reputation, he was on the whole a good if severely firm ruler, and the intensity of his hatred for the Turks is explained by his life story. In boyhood he had become a hostage of the sultan, his father surrendering him and a brother as security for good behavior, and he was regularly beaten for recalcitrance. The Turks ultimately killed his father and blinded and buried alive an elder brother. Though after achieving his freedom Vlad succeeded in retaking Wallachia from the invaders, this early success simply opened the way to a life of unceasing conflict. Like Stephen, he became an immovable obstacle to Turkish progress west of the Black Sea, and he continued to stand firm until his death in battle at age forty-five. The West owed him, as it owed Stephen, an immense debt. The two kept whole Ottoman armies tied up for decades.

Even more important, and with an even more remarkable story, was the Albanian George Kastrioti, known as Skanderbeg. He, like Vlad Dracula, was given over to the Turks as a hostage in his youth, and in contrast to the Impaler he converted to Islam, entered military service as a janissary, and rose to be a general of cavalry fighting, among other Christian leaders, Hunyadi of Hungary. But in 1443 he switched sides, and a year later won the first of what would ultimately be his more than twenty victories over his erstwhile Turkish comrades. And again the Christian states demonstrated their chronic inability to support, even to refrain from undercutting, one another. Venice, at first delighted with Skanderbeg’s repeated thrashings of the Turks, by 1447 was beginning to be wary of Albania’s growing strength. And so it declared war on Skanderbeg, offering a lifetime pension to anyone who succeeded in killing him and encouraging the Turks to attack him in his rear. In 1448, in the space of a few days, Skanderbeg so completely crushed first
the Turks and then the Venetians that the latter were obliged to come to terms. Then, his little nation exhausted and desperately in need of support, Skanderbeg offered to become a vassal of Alfonso V, promising to take an oath of fealty as soon as the last Turk had been expelled from Albania (something that was, in fact, never achieved).

Alfonso, so blithely indifferent to Pope Calixtus’s efforts to mount a crusade, was nevertheless happy to take Albania under his wing. Doing so gave him, in the person of Skanderbeg, a brilliantly able ally in his long campaign to elbow Venice aside in the eastern Mediterranean and establish an empire of his own there. It provided benefits closer to home as well. When a baronial rebellion erupted in Naples, Skanderbeg sent some of his famously ferocious light cavalry, the
stradioti
, to help Alfonso put it down. He repeated the favor in Sicily a year later, both suppressing an uprising and helping Alfonso to show enough strength to discourage a threatened invasion by the Turks. Cynical self-interest, however, remained endemic among the Italians. When the Albanian capital came under siege at one point, Venetian merchants happily sold supplies to the Turkish invaders.

By a cruel irony, Skanderbeg’s success became a factor in the fall of Constantinople: his ability to turn back one invasion after another encouraged other princes to resist Ottoman expansion as well, and this persuaded the Turks that the ancient Christian capital could not be allowed to survive. Four years after they took it, in 1457, they felt ready to attack Albania again and did so with an army of seventy thousand men. On September 2 of that year, true to form, Skanderbeg whipped them so thoroughly that the sultan agreed to a five-year truce. Once again, however, Albania was exhausted physically and financially, and this time Skanderbeg’s appeals to Alfonso V were ignored. He next appealed to Rome, and though Calixtus’s response was pathetically feeble, it appears to have been the best he could do: the immediate dispatch of the only available galley, a gift of money so inadequate as to be practically irrelevant, and a promise of more at the earliest opportunity. Skanderbeg cannot have been greatly consoled to have conferred upon him the meaningless title
Athleta Christi
—Champion of Christ. He was essentially alone, facing the dead certainty that, truce or no truce, the Turks would be back in their scores of thousands.

Without question Alfonso had it within his means to help Skanderbeg
substantially, and without question he was greatly in Skanderbeg’s debt. There being no particular need to care about the fate of Albania at the moment, however, it was not in the king’s nature to be distracted from his own immediate priorities, especially the status of his son Ferrante in the aftermath of Calixtus’s refusal to issue a bull (a document bearing the papal seal and therefore official) declaring the young man to be legitimate. It was by now clear that so long as Calixtus remained alive, Ferrante’s path to the crown would be anything but assured.

Lurking in the background through all this was the question of whether Ferrante was actually Alfonso’s son. Doubts about his paternity had stalked Ferrante all his life. From his infancy people had whispered that his real father was a half-Moorish functionary at the Aragonese court, and alternatively that Ferrante’s supposed mother had pretended to give birth to him in order to spare the wife of one of the king’s brothers the humiliation of being exposed as an adulteress. Whatever the truth—and the rumors may have been rooted in nothing more substantial than a belief the great Alfonso couldn’t possibly have fathered such an unappealing human being—by the late 1450s Calixtus was in as good a position as anyone still living to know it. At the time of Ferrante’s birth he had been Alfonso’s secretary, and at the center of Aragonese court life, for some five years.

There being nothing in Calixtus’s life story to cast doubt on his integrity or his respect for the prerogatives of royalty, his unbending opposition to Ferrante remains an enticing mystery.
Niccolò Machiavelli, who was still eleven years from being born when Alfonso died and appears to have had little evidence to draw on, would later allege that the pope was scheming to make one of his own nephews the king of Naples. This is implausible for many reasons, not least the existence of other, far more formidable claimants. Perhaps by this point Calixtus’s hatred for Alfonso had grown so powerful as to overwhelm his usual equanimity. Possibly he was repelled by the prospect of a bastard becoming anointed king of the great kingdom of Naples; having been born and raised in a culture far more feudal than Italy’s, he is likely to have taken a sternly disapproving view of illegitimate birth. Additionally, he had seen enough of the world to understand the threat to stability that sons born out of wedlock could pose when they laid claim to thrones, and the wisdom of the ancient precept that no bastard should
ever become king. And it is in no way impossible that he believed—and had reason to believe—that Ferrante was not even Alfonso’s bastard.

Finally and most interestingly, there is the fact that the pope knew Ferrante intimately: had overseen his education, functioned as a kind of guardian, and personally escorted him to Italy when Alfonso summoned him there. Ferrante’s own life story, as we shall see, makes it possible to suspect that Calixtus, knowing what kind of man he was, foresaw what kind of ruler he would be and found the prospect horrifying.

Background
 
 AMAZING ITALY

THE ITALY FOR WHICH ALONSO DE BORJA LEFT SPAIN IN THE 1440s, and to which many of his relatives later began migrating in hopes of benefiting from his exalted position, was a place that lightning had struck twice. A full thousand years after the collapse of the Roman Empire, it was once again the wonder of the world: the richest region in all of Europe because by a wide margin the most economically advanced. Its cities were incomparably the biggest, most beautiful, and most vibrant, and in fields as diverse as education and architecture, banking and art, it was leading the way to modernity.

In one area only was Italy conspicuously backward. Politically it was so fragmented, in such disarray, that strictly speaking there was no such thing as “Italy.” From the Alps southward the peninsula was a crazy quilt of large and small city-states, some of which were more or less autonomous while others were subject to domineering neighbors. They differed vastly in character and had long since shown themselves to be incapable of sustained cooperation. To the extent that their people saw themselves as members of a single Italian nation, they did so by virtue of more or less sharing a common language (“more or less” because that language was splintered into a babel of dialects) and a culture unlike any to be found elsewhere. But their nationhood, such as it was, had never come close to producing unity. That this remained true while France and Spain were beginning to coalesce under increasingly powerful monarchs meant that Italy, for all its achievements, was year by year growing comparatively weaker. It was becoming vulnerable.

How Italy had come to be such a stunning place—and that is literally what it was, newcomers from the north consistently describing themselves as stunned upon experiencing it for the first time—is of course a complicated story. Probably it starts with the fact that much of the Italian peninsula, having been the heart of the empire of the Caesars, continued during what we call the Dark Ages to cling to two things that were disappearing in places more distant from Rome. One was the town as the
core around which society was organized. Whereas throughout northern Europe cities of any significance became rare, with the nobility withdrawing into often-remote fortresses from which they could dominate populations of peasants, the most vital parts of Italy remained distinctly town-centered.

Except in the region around Rome and the sprawling kingdom of Naples, both of which developed a feudal order similar to the one prevailing beyond the Alps, the survival of the towns and the evolution of some of them into great cities became an essential element in Italy’s unique character. Class and caste distinctions grew faint and porous as nobles and merchants, artisans and soldiers and clergy, learned to live together on terms approaching equality in their crowded, lively streets. More than in any other place in Europe, the townsfolk of Italy were not oppressed, could not even be looked down on, by the hereditary nobility. To the contrary, some of the greatest cities came to be ruled by their commercial classes. It was not uncommon for nobles to be excluded from public life, and for noble families to be forced to abandon their rural strongholds and move to town.

The other fragment of the classical past that set Italy apart was the Roman law, which was not swept away in favor of rigid, status-focused feudal codes as happened elsewhere. This proved to have a profound impact intellectually, culturally, and socially. While the scholars of a slowly reviving northern Europe were focusing on theology and philosophy, in the early twelfth century their Italian counterparts discovered and undertook the study of digests of imperial law compiled under the Emperor Justinian six hundred years earlier. Italy’s traders found in the old code an ideal framework for their bustling commercial life: practical rules and regulations and guidelines, ways of doing business, that grew ever more relevant as the economy developed. The Italian universities, the first to appear anywhere on earth, attached an importance to the study of the law not to be found in France, Germany, or Spain.

Italy was shaped also, even long after Rome ceased to be the hub of the known world, by an astonishing diversity of outside influences. The Eastern Christian Empire, from its capital at Constantinople, early put its cosmopolitan stamp on Sicily and the southern part of the peninsula as well as on its main outpost on the northern Adriatic coast, the port of Ravenna. Sicily was an Arab possession until late in the eleventh century,
the Normans then came from northern France to make themselves kings of Naples as well as Sicily, both places fell next into the hands of the Spanish, and from the Dark to the High Middle Ages a succession of German chieftains and kings descended regularly upon Italy and laid claim to various parts of it. Meanwhile the bishops of Rome were evolving into popes, declaring themselves the spiritual leaders of all Christendom, and becoming the overlords of much of central Italy.