The Borgias (30 page)

None of which constitutes proof that the best man did not get the job by buying it, of course. But consider: to whatever extent money may have been a factor in the election, the big money was in the hands of della Rovere and, to a lesser but still impressive extent, of Ascanio Sforza. We have already seen that Rodrigo’s wealth was probably never nearly as great as is commonly assumed; if the papacy had in fact been for sale in 1492, he would have found it a challenge to outbid the competition. Nor, if he had attempted to buy it, could he ever have bought the votes of those cardinals who were definitely not for sale. The ambassadors who wrote home complaining of simony had personal agendas of their own. Usually they were attempting to excuse their failure to predict the election’s outcome. It is said that when Ferrante of Naples learned of the election’s result, he burst into tears. It is even suggested that he did so because it grieved him to see the papacy fall into the hands of such a bad man. That so vicious an old reprobate would be capable of deploring any such thing is preposterous. If anything made Ferrante weep, it was not corruption (almost the least of his own crimes) but the emergence of a pontiff who was likely to be impossible to control. While the conclave was still in process, he had described Rodrigo as “this one who has energy, brains, and resources”—and who should, therefore, be stopped from taking the throne. France, Venice, and Florence were all uneasy for exactly the same reason. Ferdinand and Isabella, on the other hand, were delighted at the election of an old friend and another Spanish pope.

Regardless of what or whether he shouted for joy, a man as well prepared and brimming with vitality as Rodrigo Borgia must have been thrilled to be elected. After a daylong coronation ceremony during which the people of Rome rejoiced at the crowning of a popular figure and the heavily robed object of their celebration fainted more than once in the summertime heat, Pope Alexander VI threw himself into his new role with his customary brio. Required as all new popes were to relinquish his benefices, he ended the month of August with a consistory at which the many bishoprics, abbeys, and other properties that he had accumulated over the decades were passed to other hands. Most of the cardinals benefited to a greater or lesser extent, providing inexhaustible
ammunition to those writers who, over the centuries, have pointed to this first consistory of his reign as the mechanism through which Alexander redeemed the pledges that had bought him the throne.

But what is proved, really, by the fact that Alexander made Ascanio Sforza his successor as vice-chancellor? That he saw in the young Sforza not only a political ally but someone to whom he was willing to entrust important responsibilities, obviously. But if that is evidence of corruption, so is the time-honored practice of new U.S. presidents giving top posts not only to members of their own party but to individuals who helped them get elected. As for the fact that Alexander also gave Ascanio the sprawling palace that he had cobbled together out of a collection of derelict buildings, we saw earlier that it had from the start been not only Cardinal Rodrigo’s residence but a headquarters for the chancery’s great bureaucracy. Ascanio had no property of his own suitable for such purposes. That it was and would remain less a personal residence than a place of business is suggested by its subsequent history. It would pass from Ascanio to the next vice-chancellor after him, and beyond that to three more incumbents before finally being taken over by the papal treasury. That it was ultimately torn down and built over, and that no one ever bothered to make a picture of it or describe it in detail, raises doubts about whether it ever merited comparison with the many grand palaces that were being constructed in Rome at this same time and that continue to draw visitors to the city to the present day.

Alexander also attended to the interests of his family, but to an extent far too modest, in the beginning, to cause concern or even attract attention. At the same consistory at which he distributed his benefices, he appointed a single new cardinal, a Lanzol kinsman known in Rome as Giovanni Borgia. This was in no way shocking, not only because nepotism was taken for granted but because in this case the beneficiary was unquestionably well qualified. The new Cardinal Borgia, whom historians call Giovanni Borgia the Elder to distinguish him from a subsequent appointee of Alexander’s of the same name, had been brought to the papal court by his uncle Rodrigo many years before and had carved out an impressive career for himself there. He became a protonotary apostolic and then archbishop of Monreale in Sicily under Sixtus IV, served as governor of Rome under Innocent VIII, and had long been one of his uncle’s closest associates. Alexander’s transfer of
his archbishopric of Valencia to a little-known adolescent named Cesare Borgia at this same time was, if less defensible, by no means a scandal. The see of Valencia had been in the Borgia family for more than sixty years at this point. If passing it along to a third generation was an act of nepotistic excess, it was nonetheless trivial when compared with some of the things that had come before, and the fact that Valencia was in Spain meant that it was a matter of little interest to the Italian cardinals. Beyond that, Alexander limited himself to bestowing the captaincy of the papal guard on a great-nephew and namesake from Spain, Rodrigo Lanzol y de Borja, and giving some minor administrative positions in the Papal States to a few other kinsmen so obscure that we don’t know how they were related to him.

The initial distribution of offices completed, Alexander turned to the most pressing of the problems left to him by Innocent VIII. The weakness of the late pope, especially in his final half-year when failing health made him more passive than ever, had allowed Rome and the surrounding territories to fall into even worse disorder than they usually did in the absence of firm leadership. The College of Cardinals had attempted to maintain order, sending crossbowmen into the streets, but this had limited effect. The Orsini and Colonna and other baronial clans got up to their usual black mischief, and criminals of all sorts found themselves free to do their worst with little fear of consequences.
From the point at which it became known that Innocent was dying, more than two hundred murders were known to have been committed inside the city walls.

Alexander cracked down hard. On September 3 two notorious murderers, the del Rosso brothers, were publicly hanged and their house was pulled down. Those guilty of lesser crimes found themselves locked in the dungeons of the Castel Sant’Angelo. Not many weeks of this were needed to bring the city under control. A new force of watchmen and constables—twenty-one of them just for the Tiber bridges—made certain that it stayed that way.

Alexander was equally quick to address the abuses of a municipal justice system that had become seriously corrupt. He created new judgeships, appointed doctors of law to fill them, and ordered them to give a hearing to all complaints. He saw to it that they and other officials were paid promptly and well enough not to be tempted by petty
bribes at least. This was the start of a series of reforms that culminated in a decree prescribing stern penalties for any officer of justice in any of the Papal States who either solicited or accepted a gift from anyone connected with a criminal or civil case. All decisions issued by judges found to have accepted a gift, or even to have agreed to do so, were declared null and void.

All this was remarkably advanced for its time, and Alexander went further still, initiating a practice without precedent in the history of the papacy. He reserved Tuesday as a day on which, every week, he would be personally available to any Roman, male or female, who came to see him with a complaint or petition. Those who came were allowed to speak for as long as they wished on any subject of their choosing. And he reformed the Vatican’s financial administration, imposing new checks on spending and significantly reducing the costs of the papal household.
Even as intransigent a hater of popes in general and Borgias in particular as Stefano Infessura (in whose diary we find a weird story of a Jewish doctor bleeding three boys to death in a futile effort to save the life of Innocent VIII) conceded that Alexander’s reign “began most admirably.”

At the start of the conclave that had ended in his election, like all the other cardinals present, Rodrigo had signed a capitulation pledging, if he became pope, to call a general council of the Church. Even if after his election he had remained free to choose, quite possibly Pope Alexander would have followed the example of his predecessors and ignored this promise. Possibly but not certainly—by 1492 most cardinals wanted a council, not as in the past to undercut the authority of the pope, but to develop a program for raising the standards of the clergy generally. Throughout his life Rodrigo Borgia was not only not opposed to reform but a champion of it, as he had shown in his missions to Spain and Naples. The question is academic in any case; Alexander was not long free to choose. In short order problems arose that made the convening of a council first inadvisable and ultimately impossible.

The first of these problems emerged almost simultaneously with Alexander’s coronation. Count Franceschetto Cibo, Innocent VIII’s feckless son, had decided as his father’s death approached that he had no wish to try to hold on to the various properties of which he had been made lord. This was a sensible decision, Cibo being totally unsuited to
the cutthroat struggle for advantage that dominated the lives of Italy’s petty tyrants. He was not only a worse weakling than his father but a compulsive and unsuccessful gambler, and in chronic need of cash. As Innocent’s reign ended, he prudently left Rome for his wife’s home in Florence. There, with the connivance of his brother-in-law Piero de’ Medici and the pope’s old rival Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, he set out to sell his property.

An eager buyer turned up in the person of Virginio Orsini, lord of Bracciano and at this time his family’s most powerful layman; only his cousin Cardinal Giovanni Battista Orsini possessed comparable influence. Virginio, recognizing a rare opportunity, declared himself willing to pay Cibo upward of forty thousand ducats for an assortment of castles and settlements less than a day’s ride north of Rome. There were difficulties, however. They began with the fact that the location of Cibo’s properties—at Cerveteri, Anguillara, Canale Monterano, and Rota—gave them strategic value in the eternal contest for control of the Papal States. Nobody distrustful of the Orsini, or of their ally and patron Ferrante of Naples, would be happy to see them fall into Virginio’s hands. The Sforza would regard such a development as intolerable. Worse, the properties in question were not actually Cibo’s to sell; they were fiefs of the pope. Complicating the situation still further, Virginio Orsini was himself simultaneously a papal vassal by virtue of his lordship of Bracciano and a
condottiere
serving as great constable of the kingdom of Naples—as, that is, commander of the armies of that tormenter of popes King Ferrante. At a time of recurrent friction between Naples and Rome, Virginio’s position was so ambiguous, his loyalties so mixed, as to be indecipherable. Such were the ambiguities of Italian life as the Renaissance was coming to full flower.

Not surprisingly, in light of how useful Cibo’s castles could prove to Ferrante whenever he next set out to make trouble in the Papal States, Alexander thought he saw the king’s hand in the proposed sale. He became convinced, very likely with Ascanio Sforza’s encouragement, that Ferrante was lending the purchase price to Virginio as the first step in a plan to turn the castles into outposts from which Naples could threaten Rome. About the financing of the transaction, at least, Alexander was wrong. The money was being supplied by Piero de’ Medici, whose mother and wife were both Orsini and whose sister was married
to Cibo. But even if he had learned of his error, the pope would have had reason to remain troubled. The proposed sale would weaken papal authority in the Campagna district near Rome whether the castles ended up in Virginio’s possession or in Ferrante’s, and regardless of where the money came from. And an important principle was at stake: if Cibo and Virginio could close the deal without so much as acknowledging a need for papal approval, all the warlords of the Papal States would be encouraged to forget their obligations to Rome.

Nor would Alexander have been comforted had he known how deeply the Medici were involved. Or if he had been able to see that the driving force behind the crisis, its evil genius, was Giuliano della Rovere, whose continually building anger at having lost the papal election had sent him to Florence in search of ways to make trouble. He found his opportunity in Cibo’s eagerness to sell, Virginio’s hunger to buy, and Piero’s willingness to arrange the financing. The situation must have delighted him, especially the prospect of punishing Alexander and Ascanio for denying him the papal crown. The ramifications reached in every direction, and so many powerful men had a stake in the outcome that the potential consequences were beyond reckoning. Even the College of Cardinals broke once again into factions.

It was from such petty beginnings that the undoing of all Italy proceeded. Cibo had already handed over the castles to Virginio by the time Alexander learned of the sale, and when the pope objected, he was ignored. When word reached Milan of what was happening, Ludovico Sforza’s fear of being left isolated turned into something approaching panic. It was undoubtedly his brother Ascanio who, making full use of his insider position as vice-chancellor and papal friend, persuaded Alexander to summon a consistory at which he denounced Ferrante and effectively accused della Rovere of treason. Ferrante, himself alarmed now and in the unfamiliar position of being innocent of the charges against him, sent his son Federico to Rome to smooth things over. Duke Federico’s instructions were to offer not just an alliance but marriages between two members of the Neapolitan royal family and a couple of the numerous young Borgias who had been crowding into the papal court since Alexander’s election. Nothing came of this; a pact with Naples would have wrecked negotiations that Ascanio Sforza already had in process, on the pope’s behalf, to reconcile his brother in
Milan and the government of Venice. Federico had to return to his father with nothing to show for two months at the papal court. Della Rovere, back in Rome but seeing the tide running strongly against him, withdrew to Ostia and barricaded himself inside a fortress commanding the Vatican’s access to the sea. Alexander responded by moving troops into the nearby coastal city of Civitavecchia, creating a standoff. When Ascanio’s negotiations bore fruit in the form of a new League of St. Mark, allying Rome not only with Milan and Venice but with the smaller city-states of Siena, Mantua, and Ferrara, a shocked Ferrante assured della Rovere that Naples would come to his aid if Alexander moved against him. General war seemed just one provocation away.