The Borgias (33 page)

Why he bothered is a mystery, for he never displayed the smallest interest in the future of the dynasty. He had a marriage of convenience with the wealthy widow of one of his father’s generals, and a single mistress with whom he sired two daughters only one of whom, Bianca Maria, lived past infancy. When in 1430 he betrothed the six-year-old girl to the greatest
condottiere
of the century, the thirty-year-old widower Francesco Sforza (whose first wife and child had been murdered by his aunt), Filippo Maria offered valuable properties as his daughter’s dowry and appears to have been motivated solely by a determination to keep Sforza in his employ. He later made repeated attempts to break off the engagement, with Sforza sometimes on his payroll and at other times leading the armies of Milan’s enemies. When the wedding finally took place in 1441 (Bianca being sixteen by then, the bridegroom forty), Filippo Maria was forced to consent to it because of defeats inflicted on him by Venetian forces commanded by none other than his prospective son-in-law.

Filippo Maria anointed no heir, and when he died in 1447, the claimants to Milan included the Holy Roman emperor (because he was Milan’s feudal overlord), Valentina Visconti’s son Charles duke of Orléans, the Republic of Venice, and Francesco Sforza. All were held off as Milan became a republic, but this proved a doomed enterprise. Sforza made war on the capital, forcing it to surrender after a prolonged siege that reduced the population to eating cats and dogs. Once securely in place as duke, he became less interested in conquest than in protecting what he had won and turned into a force for peace and stability. He forged a close friendship with Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence, and the two worked together to put a durable balance of power in place across Italy.

He found himself happily married as well. Bianca Maria Visconti Sforza proved to be a dependable manager, a capable diplomat, and therefore a duchess of real consequence. The pair had eight children, and of these only one, unfortunately their eldest son Galeazzo Maria, gave evidence of having inherited the Visconti tendency to madness. Upon succeeding his father at age twenty-two, Galeazzo Maria set about
building a reputation as a rapist, torturer, and murderer (starving to death a priest accused of predicting that his reign would be short). He cast aside his worried mother and inevitably was accused of having her poisoned when she died in exile. We have already seen the calamities that flowed from all this. First Galeazzo Maria was himself murdered, by Milanese nobles he had pushed too far. Then his brother Ludovico seized power, took custody of the seven-year-old heir to the ducal title, Gian Galeazzo, and proclaimed himself regent. Things got mortally serious a decade later, when Gian Galeazzo came of age, his wife Isabella protested to her grandfather Ferrante of Naples that Ludovico was refusing to relinquish control, and Ferrante broke with Milan and left Ludovico feeling so alone and fearful that he not only invited the king of France to invade Italy but offered to pay him to do so.

Anxieties about Naples notwithstanding, by 1493 there was every reason for the Milanese to think themselves fortunate to be ruled by Ludovico. He was as solidly normal a man as the Visconti-Sforza family tree had produced, with the exception of Duke Francesco. Intelligent, energetic, and cultivated, superbly educated under the direction of his mother Bianca, he displayed none of the psychopathic viciousness of his elder brother, his maternal grandfather, his great-uncle, and other ancestors dating back to Matteo and Bernabò Visconti. Since pushing his sister-in-law out of the regency, he had given much attention to the development of Milan’s economy. He had come to be known as Il Moro not (as has often been written) because he was dark like a Moor (in fact he was fair with his family’s golden hair) but because
moro
is the Italian word for his personal emblem, the mulberry tree. Known since ancient times as “the most prudent of trees,” last to put out leaves in the springtime, the mulberry was an essential source of food for the worms on which Milan’s lucrative silk-manufacturing industry was based.

Prudent or not—the 1490s would provide reason for doubting that he was—Il Moro had much cause for satisfaction as it became clear that Charles of France was serious about attacking Naples. Now it was Ferrante’s turn to be frightened—he and Pope Alexander as well. Il Moro meanwhile had a bride with whom he was delighted, the lovely and vivacious Beatrice d’Este, daughter of the duke of Ferrara. Since her arrival in Milan in 1491, Beatrice had, almost inevitably under the circumstances, developed a poisonously hateful relationship with the frustrated
Duchess Isabella. Still only sixteen, Beatrice became a determined advocate of the use of French power to drive her rival’s family out of Naples.

In the year following Il Moro’s marriage, the resolution of issues that had long put the French crown at odds with the Holy Roman Empire made it possible for him to form a friendship with emperor-elect Maximilian of Hapsburg without offending France. The two worked out a deal. The cash-strapped Maximilian got, in addition to Duke Gian Galeazzo’s sister as his bride, something that probably mattered to him far more: a dowry in the amount of four hundred thousand ducats. Il Moro got the prestige of linking the Sforza family to the highest level of European royalty and also (what mattered to
him
far more) the promise that upon becoming emperor Maximilian would invest him as duke of Milan, stripping the title from Gian Galeazzo.

Ludovico il Moro was no longer isolated. To the contrary, his position as de facto French agent in Italy, coupled with the expectation of an imminent French invasion, made him an enemy to be feared and an ally to be coveted. Thus even his old rival Venice, wanting no trouble with France, joined with Milan and Rome in the newly formed League of St. Mark and accepted Ludovico as its head. And Beatrice’s family connections now proved their value. Her father Ercole d’Este brought his duchy of Ferrara into the league, followed by Francesco Gonzaga marquess of Mantua, who was married to Beatrice’s sister Isabella.

To cap it all off, Milan had as its representative in Rome none other than the vice-chancellor of the Church, Ascanio Sforza, cardinal since 1484 and pivotal figure in the election of Alexander VI. Comfortably back in his old place at the papal court now that Milan and Rome were allied in the league, Ascanio was prepared to do everything in his power to persuade Alexander to support the French claim to Naples. He was no less willing, if that proved impossible, to join the chorus of voices urging Charles to depose the pope as he passed through Rome on his way to Naples.

Of all the princes in Italy, Ludovico Sforza seemed best positioned to profit from the drama that was beginning to unfold.

12

The Coming of the French

The rush of hungry relatives and hangers-on to Rome whenever a new pope took office appears to have been no less a spectacle in the case of the Borgias than at the start of other pontifical reigns.

This was true in part simply because the family was so large and so fast-growing. At a time when infant mortality rates were heartbreakingly high, the ability to produce healthy babies in abundance and bring them to maturity was one of the Borgia family’s gifts. Most of the Borgia couples of whom we have record were survived by impressive numbers of daughters and sons, who were prolific in their turn if they did not go into the Church—and no doubt occasionally even then. They were a vigorous and hearty lot, ready to go wherever opportunity beckoned.

The family tree was not only thick with branches but maddeningly tangled—a trap for genealogists ever since. As happens in many families, baptismal names were handed down from generation to generation: Rodrigos and Jofrès, Juans and Juanas, Pedros and Isabellas appear again and again, sometimes more than once in a single generation. The confusion to which this gave rise was compounded twice over by a practice somewhat more unusual: the tendency of the offspring of Borgia daughters to discard their father’s surname because their mother’s, belonging as it did not merely to a pope but to
two
popes, had come to carry so much more weight.

The confusion spread everywhere and has been long-lasting. Even today one sees it asserted that the Rodrigo Borgia who became Alexander VI was actually not a Borgia at all in the male line but a Lanzol (or Lançol). This particular misunderstanding is not only unnecessary but inexcusable, there being no possible doubt, as we saw in Part One, that Rodrigo’s father
and
his mother were de Borjas. It grew out of the marriage of Rodrigo’s sister Juana to a Valencian baron named Pedro Guillen Lanzol, and the fact that their children bore, in keeping with Spanish practice, the name Lanzol y de Borja. The first members of this branch of the clan to migrate to Rome created the impression that all Borgias were actually Lanzols, and this assumption—valid with respect to all the Roman Borgias except the two popes and Rodrigo’s short-lived brother Pedro Luis—came to be attached, incorrectly, to Rodrigo. It clung to him even as his relatives gradually discarded the Lanzol patronym because being Borgias marked them as people not to be taken lightly.

Some of the Roman Borgias remain mysteries to this day. When Cardinal Scarampo took a fleet of warships off to fight the Turks in 1456, two of his galley captains were named Juan and Miguel Borgia. We have no idea where these two came from, but their name and the fact that both later turn up as administrators in the Papal States make it impossible not to suppose that they were related to Calixtus and Alexander. More strikingly, no one has ever been able to explain the parentage of a certain Francesco Borgia who was a prominent figure at the papal court throughout Alexander’s reign, was repeatedly given responsibility for handling important family business, and would become a cardinal in 1500. Speculation that he was Calixtus’s illegitimate son is supported by no evidence and has to be considered improbable. Perhaps it needs to be added that he was no more than a decade younger than Alexander VI and therefore was not
his
son. One hypothesis—not implausible considering that he is believed to have been born in Játiva—is that he was Alexander’s younger brother.

Young Borgia clerics found themselves rising even higher and faster after Rodrigo became pope than they had before, and the family’s laymen too found doors opening for them in delightful ways. Some of the most dazzling opportunities were in the dynastic marriage market. We have already seen the lofty unions arranged by Sixtus IV for his
nephews and nieces, and by Innocent VIII for his son and granddaughter. By the early 1490s, with Italy in turmoil and a French invasion seemingly inevitable, the desperation with which the peninsula’s rulers were looking for allies had brought that market to a rolling boil.

Pope Alexander, attractive as an ally himself and as needful of friends as any of his fellow rulers, had four especially fine pieces of merchandise to put on offer in Rome. They were the quartet of Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia, and Jofrè Borgia, siblings who at the time of Alexander’s election ranged in age from about ten or eleven to seventeen. They had an older, closer connection to the pope than any of their cousins, having been part of Cardinal Rodrigo’s household for at least four or five years, in some cases possibly longer. We have already seen Ferrante, at the end of 1492, send his son to Rome in search of an alliance, offering both a daughter and a granddaughter as brides for Borgias and being turned down. Just weeks later, as part of the agreement by which Rome, Milan, and Venice all came together in the League of St. Mark, Alexander and Ludovico il Moro jointly decided that Lucrezia, still not thirteen years old, was to be married to Ludovico’s cousin Giovanni Sforza, lord of Pesaro and a twenty-six-year-old widower.

It was Alexander’s policy, from which he never deviated except when circumstances made consistency impossible, to seek friendly relations with all the major powers and try to keep any of them from feeling isolated. Thus the creation of the Italian League, because it excluded Naples, became the pope’s cue not only to restore his lines of communication with the excluded Ferrante but to respond, if belatedly, to the latter’s proposal that the Borgias and the royal House of Aragon should become linked through matrimony. The result, abetted by Ferdinand of Spain’s envoy to Rome Diego López de Haro, was a pair of significant betrothals. Jofrè, who could not have been more than eleven years old, was promised to Ferrante’s illegitimate granddaughter Sancia, then about fifteen. Jofrè’s elder brother Juan, then in his late teens, was to return to Castile to be married into the Spanish royal family. The youngest of the Borgia brothers would not have been Ferrante’s choice as bridegroom for Sancia, his brother Cesare being not only more suitable in age but clearly the brightest, liveliest, and most promising of the young Borgias. But Alexander had long since assigned Cesare to a career in the Church, and though his young ward had not yet taken any
clerical vows, the pope had no interest in changing his plans. Jofrè too was in the earliest stages of being groomed for the clergy, but in his case the pope was willing to make adjustments. He certainly understood that Cesare was made of stronger stuff than his younger sibling—that he had far more of what it would take to become a third Borgia pope.