The Borgias (31 page)

Everyone was afraid and mistrustful, and therefore everyone had become dangerously unpredictable. The League of St. Mark, created largely to assuage Ludovico Sforza’s sense of isolation, was inherently unstable. Though its members pledged themselves to remain allies for twenty-five years, Venice’s hunger for Milanese territory made this almost laughably unrealistic. Nevertheless it spooked Ferrante into preparing for a war that he emphatically did not want, the forces arrayed against him being now so numerous, and simultaneously launched him on an almost hysterical campaign to break the bond of trust that had linked Ferdinand of Spain and Rodrigo Borgia for the past twenty years. In a flurry of letters to his agents in Spain, to officials at the Spanish court, and to Ferdinand and Isabella themselves, Ferrante warned that Rome was now ruled by a monster in human form.
In one of these missives, signed on June 7, 1493, and addressed to Ferdinand, he complained that “the Pope leads such a life that he is abhorred by everyone … he is anxious to be engaged in war, for from the beginning of his papacy he has done nothing else than seeking or causing trouble [and is] constantly at work with fraudulent machinations.”

Ferrante’s motives were transparently self-serving, his credibility nil. Ferdinand of Spain was as far from being credulous as it is possible for a human being to be, and he knew his Neapolitan cousin far too well not to see through this invective. Thus Ferrante’s word had no effect on Ferdinand’s opinion of a pope whom he had good reason to regard as a friend. To the extent that those words have provided rich fertilizer for the black Borgia myth, they should be measured against the reply of Juan López, bishop of Perugia, when asked by Spain for his
opinion. “
Rest assured,” López replied, “that the life, the intentions, and the sagacity of the Pontiff are different from what your letter represents them to be. I tell you, sir, that of the other popes whom you mention, not a one had a mind so exalted nor was one so respected as Pope Alexander, for his long experience, his intelligence, and his activity.” López was a native of Valencia who had entered the service of Rodrigo Borgia at an early age and served for a time as his private secretary. He knew whereof he wrote, therefore, and would appear to have had no reason to deceive the Spanish court. Even if one assumes that loyalty caused his opinion of Alexander VI to be excessively high, surely this implies nothing discreditable about the object of his admiration. Nor does it seem likely that loyalty to a onetime patron would have induced him to deceive a monarch as powerful as Ferdinand of Spain.

At the same time that Ferrante was attempting to interest Ferdinand in his problems, Ludovico Sforza of Milan was attempting to interest Charles of France in
his
. In this lay the tragedy of Italy—that its arcane quarrels drove its most important rulers to seek outside help at precisely the moment when the two rising powers of the north, France and Spain, were looking for new worlds to conquer. France, having absorbed the great duchies of Brittany and Burgundy and recovered from its long war with England, was as the 1490s began in the hands of an inexperienced king who nursed fantasies of achieving military glory on an intercontinental scale. Ferdinand and Isabella, having completed the unification of Spain by conquering Granada just seven months before Rodrigo Borgia became pope, were brimming with confidence and looking for uses for their growing power. Though they neither respected nor trusted their cousin in Naples—in fact they believed that their own claim to the Neapolitan crown superseded that of the bastard Ferrante—they were also acutely aware of French claims not only to Naples but to Milan as well. There could be no doubt about which side they would favor if Ferrante found himself in conflict with Milan and, through Milan, with France. And so the ludicrous character of Ferrante’s complaints about Pope Alexander did not deter Ferdinand from dispatching one of his most distinguished envoys to Rome to intervene on Ferrante’s behalf. Diego López de Haro arrived at the pontifical court with a long list of issues that his master wanted resolved. At the
top were the League of St. Mark’s hostility to Naples and—another matter with which the Spanish monarchs urgently wanted help—Spain’s rights in the uncharted lands that Christopher Columbus had reported finding upon returning from his epic voyage of discovery only a few months earlier.

The timing was good, and things came together nicely. When the pope issued a bull legitimating Spanish claims in what Columbus himself believed was easternmost India or perhaps China, López de Haro was freed to be equally cooperative in return. And when Ferrante offered to press Virginio Orsini to compromise on Franceschetto Cibo’s disputed castles—he would have been eager to get that quarrel settled even if he had not been prodded by Ferdinand’s ambassador—Alexander too was willing to be responsive. It was known that representatives of Charles of France were in Italy on their way to Rome and that their assignment was to request—to demand, really—that Alexander invest their master with the crown of Naples. Ferrante most desperately of all, but also the pope and López de Haro, wanted to get their business settled before the Frenchmen arrived. Alexander knew as well as anyone that the League of St. Mark was worth little more than the parchment it was written on, and he was quicker than most to see the dangers of the Sforzas’ growing entanglement with France. As for Virginio, not even the chief of the Orsini could defy a combination that included his liege lord the pope, his employer the king of Naples, and the distant but fearsome king of Spain.

Thus it was all speedily wrapped up: a multifaceted settlement at the core of which was an end to the quarrel over the Cibo castles. Virginio agreed to pay thirty-five thousand ducats for the properties and to pay them not to Franceschetto Cibo, who was left out in the cold, but to Alexander as overlord. To put some political distance between the castles and Naples, they were sold not to Virginio himself but to his son. Virginio acknowledged that the transaction required the pope’s approval, thus resolving a crucial question of principle in Rome’s favor. The extent of Ferrante’s fear of the French, his determination to get everything settled before Charles VIII’s representatives could get to Rome, is evident in the fact that he and not the Medici bank ended up advancing the Orsini the purchase price. When Charles’s envoy Peron de Basche arrived just a few days later and demanded that the pope acknowledge
the French king’s right to Naples, Alexander replied that the issue was legal rather than political and would have to be decided by a panel of lawyers. Basche responded angrily, knowing that he was being finessed, warning that the pope’s refusal to cooperate could lead to the calling of a general council. He knew, however, that the answer he had been given was as reasonable as it was adroit. Alexander took pains to be clear about one thing: his willingness to submit Charles’s claim to the scrutiny of experts would be contingent on France’s refraining from the use of force. If France attacked Naples, its claim would be rejected forthwith. In laying down these terms he foreshadowed the policy that would guide him in the months ahead and make it forever impossible to accuse him of being duplicitous in this matter. His deflection of Basche’s demands was masterful. Though it baffled and infuriated the ambassador, it kept Alexander free to offer his friendship to Charles and Ferrante alike.

On the diplomatic front, Alexander was racking up one success after another. He had profited handsomely from the transfer of the castles from Franceschetto Cibo to the Orsini, receiving both an infusion of gold ducats and confirmation of the papacy’s feudal rights. He had diverted Ferrante from going to war and had settled his own differences with the Orsini. He had even effected a reconciliation with Giuliano della Rovere, who came out from behind his battlements in Ostia and in company with Virginio journeyed to the Vatican to dine with the pope. The stature that these achievements had conferred upon him, and through him on his family, is reflected in the sudden interest of the kings of Naples and Spain alike in linking themselves to the pope through marriage.

There were difficulties all the same, and if these were unintended, they were nonetheless laden with danger. The return of della Rovere to the papal court was taken as a rebuke by Ascanio Sforza, who repaired to his brother’s court in Milan. His arrival, which Ludovico may have interpreted as meaning that Ascanio had been banished, angered and frightened the regent anew. Seeing that Naples was now rich in allies, certain that at the first opportunity Ferrante would gleefully drive him out of Milan and make Gian Galeazzo duke in fact as well as in title, Ludovico can hardly be blamed for thinking that his survival depended on recruiting support wherever it might be found.

He must have been comforted, however, by evidence that the rapprochement between Rome and Naples was quickly beginning to fray. When Alexander tried to demonstrate that he would welcome friendship with Milan and France, Ferrante took this as a betrayal. He resumed his old game of hiring
condottieri
to make trouble in the Papal States. Sensitivities grew so keen that it became impossible for Alexander to strike a balance acceptable to both sides. His nomination in September 1493 of twelve new cardinals sparked angry objections among the Sacred College’s sitting members. This happened not for the reason usually given—the youth of two of the pope’s choices, Alessandro Farnese and the same Cesare Borgia who had earlier been given the see of Valencia—but mainly because of the sheer number of nominees, and to a lesser extent because so many of them were longtime associates of the pope’s and disposed to follow his lead.

The college had always been uneasy about increases in its size, nothing being more obvious than that as the number of members grew, each member declined in importance. And now Alexander was adding a full dozen at once, more than half of them Curia officials likely to side with him in almost any crisis, plus two fellow Spaniards and a scattering of northern Europeans unlikely ever to become much involved in Roman or Vatican politics. The number was not unprecedented, but it was certainly unusual, half a century having passed since Eugenius IV’s creation of seventeen new cardinals at a single stroke in 1439. Even those cardinals who were not in sympathy with Alexander’s policies would have conceded that it made good sense for an ambitious pontiff to start loading the Sacred College with longtime associates, youthful protégés, and distant foreigners. To do otherwise would have been folly; by appointing cardinals likely to be uncooperative, Alexander would have been impeding the pursuit of his own priorities. His choices confirmed—as though confirmation were needed—that he was no fool and that he was in firm charge of Rome and the Church. He was entrenching himself for the battles he knew to lie ahead.

As for Farnese and Cesare Borgia, there was no real problem. Farnese was of distinguished family and well known at court, having been singled out for advancement in the reign of Innocent VIII. He was also virtually a member of the papal household, his famously beautiful sister Giulia being married to Orsino Orsini, the son of Alexander’s cousin
and domestic manager Adriana del Milà. Cesare Borgia, if not familiar to many of the cardinals, was certainly a familiar type, and no one could have been astonished by the spectacle of a pope raising an unproven kinsman to the highest level of the hierarchy. The question of exactly how this particular young favorite was related to this particular pope will be addressed in due course.

The real problem with the new cardinals rose out of the grievances of the Italian states. Not one of the appointees was from Naples, Alexander perhaps thinking that he was already seen as excessively friendly to Il Regno. Predictably, Ferrante took this as an affront. The sole Milanese nominee was a protégé of Ascanio Sforza, who in fact had proposed him as a candidate, but by this point Alexander’s relations with the Sforza brothers had deteriorated to such an extent that no mere red hat could make a significant difference. Ludovico had become convinced that his fate and those of his wife and children depended upon getting himself invested as duke, and that the only man in Europe with both the ability and the willingness to make this happen was Charles VIII of France.

Charles for his part had ample reasons to want to be helpful: dreams of greatness that he thought it his destiny to fulfill. Barely twenty-three years old in the summer of 1493, he had inherited the crown from his father Louis XI while still a child and spent several years under the tutelage of his canny sister Anne de Beaujeu, who ruled as regent until he came of age. He was an odd little figure, comically ill formed, with a large red nose on a head too big for his spindly body and splayed feet that caused him to walk in a crablike shuffle. Not long after he became king, his sister’s government had provided men and ships for the quixotic expedition that led to their cousin Henry Tudor’s coronation as Henry VII of England. The improbable success of this adventure undoubtedly contributed to Charles’s romantic vision of himself as a future conquering hero. He fixated on a part of his supposed inheritance that his father had been too shrewd to take seriously: the idea that with the extinction of the House of Anjou they had become the rightful kings of Naples, and that Alfonso V and his son Ferrante were interlopers with no legitimate claim. Told that as king of Naples he was also king of Jerusalem, Charles clutched that fantasy to his breast as well.

Ludovico’s urgent wish to become duke of Milan fit in nicely with Charles’s aspirations. As early as 1491 the young king communicated his willingness to support Ludovico in supplanting his nephew as soon as circumstances permitted. Thereby he won Milan’s strongman as his ally and willing agent. In the autumn of 1492 Charles summoned representatives of his kingdom’s three estates to the city of Tours to hear his announcement of a crusade against the Turks and his intention to take possession of Naples along the way. When the more experienced of his counselors threw up their hands at the impracticality of all this—among other problems it was impossibly beyond the French crown’s financial resources—Charles cheerfully ignored them. It was at about this time that the Venetian diplomat Zaccaria Contarini, in a description of the France of his day, included a revealing sketch of the young king.