The Borgias (17 page)

Pius II was a restless spirit who had spent much of his life on diplomatic missions, and he loved to travel and had no affection for Rome. He also loved the land of his birth, Tuscany. Upon leaving Mantua, having
no wish to return to a Vatican from which he had already been absent for some eight months, he now led his party to Siena. Like the previous year’s visit to his home village, this was a sentimental journey; Pius had spent happy if impoverished years as a student in Siena, and much later he had been the city’s bishop, albeit a usually absent one. He settled in for what he hoped would be a long and pleasant stay, seeking relief for his damaged feet at the nearby hot baths. He paid little attention to reports that Rome, as invariably happened in the absence of the pope and his court, was showing signs of disorder. Rodrigo cannot have shared his relaxed attitude; as vice-chancellor he had to keep abreast of developments back in Rome. The chancery’s affairs were too essential to the papacy itself, and raised too many questions of policy, to be left in the hands of functionaries. Couriers would have been galloping to and fro between Siena and Rome, carrying Rodrigo’s paperwork.

The disappointments of Mantua turned out to be almost trivial compared with the troubles that came down on Pius’s head during this second sojourn in Tuscany. His chances of mounting a crusade of sufficient magnitude to accomplish anything of importance were dealt a serious setback—though Pius refused to admit it, probably even to himself—when Duke Philip of Burgundy (then an autonomous and immensely wealthy state) sent word that he would not be able to join the other participants until a year after the projected launch. Actually this was a polite way for Philip to drop out without admitting that he was doing so; he was being pressed to withdraw by his kinsman the king of France. Everyone understood that his postponement was actually a thinly veiled cancellation.

Other disappointments followed. Ferrante of Naples had met the Angevin invaders and his rebellious barons in battle and been whipped by them soundly; he was in serious jeopardy as a result, raising the possibility that Pius had made a costly mistake in recognizing him as king. And suddenly, up in the Romagna, the pope had a war of his own to fight, thanks to a troublesome vassal named Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, lord of Rimini. Worse still, from Rome came reports of a new conspiracy to expel the papal government and declare a republic. If the pope didn’t return soon, he was warned, he could find himself in exile like Eugenius IV twenty years before.

As a crowning blow—the reader familiar with the reputation of the
Borgias has perhaps been expecting something of this kind—Pius was visiting the healing waters of Petriolo when word reached him that back in Siena his right hand, his brilliant and beloved young vice-chancellor, had become embroiled in an absolutely outlandish scandal.

The dark side of the Borgia legend was at last beginning to unfold.

Background
 
 THE ETERNAL CITY, ETERNALLY REBORN

NO ONE SHOULD HAVE BEEN SURPRISED THAT SUCH PUBLIC order as the city of Rome enjoyed at the end of the 1450s began to disintegrate when Pius II removed the papal court to Mantua and did not return for almost a year and a half.

It was becoming all too clear, by this time, that Rome could not function—could not even survive as more than a crime-infested backwater—in the absence of the papal court. That whenever a pope was away for more than brief interludes, the city actually began to die. And that when the popes returned, its heart began to beat again. The so-called Eternal City was, ironically, the least stable, least vital, and least self-sufficient of Italy’s great capitals.

The Rome of Pius II’s time would not be recognizable to visitors from the twenty-first century any more than to visitors from the first. Its population, which totaled a million or more in the days of the Caesars and had dwindled to a pathetic twenty-five thousand at the start of the fifteenth century, cannot have been much more than fifty thousand in the 1460s. The remains of the old imperial capital were of course in ruins, most of the oldest palaces and churches having been either dismantled for their stone or transformed into makeshift fortifications behind which frightened families huddled for protection. Most of the people lived in squalor, crowded into the tangle of dark, narrow, and filthy streets that had taken shape helter-skelter around the Pantheon. Only one of the magnificent viaducts that once had supplied the city with water was still in working order, and few of the churches and palaces that are the glory of the city today had yet been built. St. Peter’s Basilica was falling apart, and most of the fabled Roman hills had been given over to crops and livestock. Anyone looking down from one of those hills would have been struck first by the innumerable towers that studded the landscape. There were towers at the ends of the bridges across the Tiber, towers on what remained of the city wall, towers rising out of the fortress-homes of every family that could afford one. They were expressions of
fear, these towers—of the need for vigilance in a chronically lawless place.

“The city is for the most part in ruins,” the poet Giannantonio Campano reported upon seeing it for the first time at midcentury, “and in such terrible condition that tears came to my eyes. The inhabitants are more like barbarians than Romans; they are repellent of aspect and speak the most different dialects.” Such words become all the more striking when one realizes that they were written fully a generation after Pope Martin V began the city’s revival. At the time they were written Nicholas V’s drive to restore Rome’s splendor was fully under way.

The Rome of the early Renaissance did have one important thing in common with the capital of the Caesars. Both were parasite cities, devourers rather than creators of wealth.
As the historian Theodor Mommsen observed, “there has perhaps never been a great city so thoroughly destitute of the means of support as Rome.” Through all the centuries when it was the center of the known world, it gave rise to no important banking institutions or manufacturing operations or anything except the bureaucracies needed for the management of a great empire. And so when the empire ceased to exist, there was no longer much reason for Rome. It was far from alone in imploding—that was the fate of urban Europe generally, one of the things that made the Dark Ages dark. But when other cities once again began to show signs of economic life, growing and generating wealth, Rome was left behind. Lacking merchants and bankers of consequence, it failed to share in the benefits brought to other places by the emergence of a commercial middle class. Finally nothing much remained but a semirural population scattered rather wretchedly among decaying ruins and at the mercy of gangster-like clans.

These clans were a constant of Roman history from the Dark Ages onward. They accumulated wealth and power while successive popes were occupied with beating back German emperors as they invaded Italy and beating down attempts to establish republican government in the city. By the late thirteenth century the clan chiefs, titled nobility or “barons” now, had nearly succeeded in making the papacy their personal property and were exploiting it ruthlessly to their own advantage.

The endless, grinding street wars in which the clans fought one another for dominance made Rome literally ungovernable for a very long time.
The withdrawal of the papacy to Avignon allowed the barons to go unchallenged except by one another through much of the fourteenth century.
A chronicler described the Rome of that time as “everywhere lust, everywhere evil, no justice, no law; there was no longer any escape; the man who was strongest with the sword was the most in the right. A person’s only hope was to defend himself with the help of his relatives and friends; every day groups of armed men were formed.” And every night those same groups ventured out to kill one another in the streets.

The feeble communal government that was pretending to rule Rome collapsed when Martin V brought the papacy back to the city in 1420. The clans, however, remained strong, and would plague every pope for the next two centuries. Conditions began to improve all the same; by introducing a modicum of law and order, Martin sparked a process of recovery. That process gathered momentum until 1434, when the Colonna drove Eugenius IV into his eight years of exile. He had not been gone long when the city again began descending into anarchy, but a measure of stability was restored with his return. As the papacy gradually recovered its strength, drawing money to the Vatican and creating increasing numbers of jobs, Rome recovered with it. Its evolution into a leading center of Renaissance culture was interrupted briefly by the republican conspiracy against Nicholas V in 1453, more seriously at the end of that decade when Pius II departed for Mantua and stayed away too long.

Eventually the people of Rome, even the barons, resigned themselves to the truth: the city had no place in the world except as the seat of a monarchy sufficiently important to bring riches from the outside world, a monarchy on which its subjects could feed. Thus there was no substitute for the papacy, and the republican dream was pure folly, leading to nothing but disorder and decline. This was not a particularly welcome truth, but it was inescapable all the same. Once it was understood, opposition to papal rule was finished. It became impossible to muster popular support for any other kind of regime.

The barons, however, remained determined to preserve their power. Every new pope had to work out his own way of dealing with them.

7

Pius II: Troubles Rumored and Real

It surely makes sense, before arriving at conclusions about the first accusation of scandalous misconduct ever leveled at Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, to pause and consider just what it is that we actually
know
about the incident.

We know that in June 1460 Pope Pius II was still lingering in Tuscany, where he and his entourage had stopped en route back to Rome from Mantua. And that on the eleventh day of that month, from the retreat where he was taking the waters, the pope sent a letter to Rodrigo in Siena. This letter is unique; we know of no similar communication, no comparably stern and explicit rebuke, ever addressed by a reigning pope to a member of the Sacred College on a matter of personal behavior. The matters with which it deals, the things it reveals, and the ease with which editing can manipulate its meaning require that it be considered in full.

Beloved Son
,

We have learned that three days ago a large number of the women of Siena, adorned with all worldly vanity, gathered in the gardens of our well-beloved son Giovanni de Bichis, and that your Eminence, in contempt of the dignity of your position, remained with them from one o’clock until six o’clock in the afternoon; and that you had in your company another Cardinal to whom at least his age, if not the honor of the Holy See, should have recalled his duty. We are told that the dances were immodest and the seductions of love beyond bounds and that you yourself behaved as if you were one of the most vulgar young men of the age. In truth I should blush to set down in detail all I have been told of what happened. Not only these things themselves, but the mere mention of them, are a dishonor to the office you hold. In order to have more freedom for your amusements you forbade entry to the husbands, fathers, brothers, and relations who came with these young women. You two, with a handful of attendants, were the sole organizers and instigators. It seems that at this moment no other thing is spoken of in the town of Siena and that you are the laughingstock of everybody. Assuredly here, in the baths, where there is a great crowd of ecclesiastics and laymen, you are on everybody’s tongue. If I said I was not angry at these matters, I should commit a grave error. We are more angry than we can say, for it is a cause of dishonor to the ecclesiastical state and contempt for our ministry; it gives a pretext to those who accuse us of using our wealth and our high office for orgies, it is such things as these that cause the small esteem in which we are held by princes and powers, the daily mockery of the laity, and the reprobation hurled at our own conduct when we undertake to reprove others. The Vicar of Christ himself is an object of scorn because it is believed that he closes his eyes to these excesses
.