The Borgias (35 page)

On June 14, at the Orsini fortress of Vicovaro northeast of Rome, a pathetically small assembly of princes and warlords gathered to explore ways of mounting a resistance. The key participants were Alfonso II and his liege lord the pope. The two devoted part of the day to a discussion so private that no one else was admitted. Also in attendance, somewhat improbably, were the chiefs of Rome’s two great baronial clans, men more experienced at fighting one another than at tangling with foreigners. Fabrizio Colonna, who shared the leadership of his family with his cousin Prospero, had come to Vicovaro in spite of having recently signed a
condotta
that put him on the payroll of Charles VIII.
It was typical of the relaxed view that Italian warlords took of their contractual obligations that Fabrizio saw nothing wrong in exchanging views with his employer’s principal opponents, or in participating in a conference hosted by Virginio Orsini, not only chief of the Colonnas’ hated rivals but great constable, general-in-chief, of the army of Naples. One wonders what France’s romantic young king would have thought had he known that Fabrizio, whom he was paying handsomely with
money borrowed on onerous terms, was now promising that neither his clan nor its junior partners the Savelli family would do anything to make trouble for Naples or the Papal States when the French attack came.

A plan of defense was agreed upon that day. Alfonso II’s son Ferrandino, who now bore his father’s old title of duke of Calabria, would take a Neapolitan army north into the Romagna to block the French from using the Apennine passes. Once in place, Ferrandino would also be positioned to protect the flank of Piero de’ Medici’s Florentine army as it sealed off the roads leading southward into Tuscany. Alfonso’s brother Don Fadrique, meanwhile, was to take Naples’s war fleet northward up the coast in an attack on the port of Genoa, to prevent the French from using it to supply and reinforce their army. Virginio Orsini assumed responsibility for keeping the French out of his family’s territories north of Rome, while Alexander was to do the same for those parts of the Papal States effectively under his rule.

The army with which Charles VIII entered Italy at the start of September 1494, numbering possibly as many as forty thousand men, was an immense force not only by Italian standards but by the European standards of the time. It was a
hard
army too, made up mainly of Breton and Gascon veterans and Swiss and German mercenaries. Upon crossing the Alps they would find themselves scorned as barbarians, and they would repay the contempt of the Italians with the kind of atrocious savagery that had come to northern Europe in the time of the Hundred Years’ War.
They brought with them something else that the Italians had never seen: mobile heavy artillery. It was heavy by the standards of the day, at any rate, the biggest barrels being all of eight feet long. Never before in history had it been possible to transport such devastating weaponry at the speed of a walking horse and use it to batter down the high, thick fortress walls that for millennia had been virtually impregnable.

Precisely because it was so big and so awesomely equipped, Charles’s army had to do almost no real fighting. Its approach spread panic across the Lombard Plain and on southward, causing the forces mustered to resist its advance to move out of its path instead. This set off a sequence of betrayals, reversals, and defeats that threatened to go on until nothing of Italy’s old order remained. Events as they unfolded seemed almost
to conspire to confirm Charles VIII’s fantasies about himself as an epic hero embarked upon God’s work and fulfilling his own magnificent destiny.
His troops marched under standards bearing the words
Voluntas Dei
(By the Will of God) and
Missus a Deo
(Sent by God). These slogans were said to have been suggested by Giuliano della Rovere. He, like the king, saw impossible dreams coming true.

That the arrival of the French marked the opening of a tragic new era in Italian history was clear from the beginning. When the fleet commanded by Don Fadrique of Naples arrived too late to keep Genoa’s harbor out of the hands of a French force led by Charles VIII’s cousin Louis of Orléans, it moved on to the port of Rapallo and linked up with friendly local forces there. Just days later, however, the arrival of 2,500 of Charles’s Swiss mercenaries forced Don Fadrique to withdraw, leaving Rapallo’s garrison to be massacred and the town itself to be sacked so savagely that news of what had happened spread terror to the farthest reaches of Italy. War Italian style, in which captured towns were more likely to be ransomed than destroyed and
condottieri
tended to be forgiving of defeated foes because they knew that in the next little war the shoe might well turn up on the other foot, was consigned to the past.

On September 9 Charles reached the Lombard city of Asti, which had been a French outpost since being given to Louis of Orléans’s grandfather as part of the dowry of his bride Valentina Visconti. After receiving a warm welcome from Ludovico Sforza and his father-in-law Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara, Charles fell ill with smallpox. Though his case proved to be not fatal, it brought the offensive to another halt and so alarmed his court as to resurrect the old question of whether it was sensible to proceed all the way to Naples and expect that once there the French would be capable of overcoming Alfonso II’s defenses. There was talk of how much easier and more profitable it could be to simply take Milan instead. The duchy already was, after all, virtually in French hands, and every lawyer at the French court eagerly agreed that it belonged by right to Louis of Orléans, who was conveniently on the scene as one of Charles VIII’s senior commanders. Though Charles when sufficiently recovered dismissed such talk out of hand—probably he really did expect his campaign to continue until he sat on a throne in Jerusalem—Il Moro inevitably learned of it and was understandably
distressed. He began to have belated second thoughts about having enticed the French to come to Italy and solve his problems.

He was given further cause for worry when Charles moved on to Pavia, second only to the city of Milan as a bastion of Visconti-Sforza strength and home of Duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza, his wife Isabella of Aragon, and their young children. The king called on the duke, who as it happened was his first cousin (their mothers were daughters of the duke of Savoy) and in his usual bad health. Duchess Isabella took the initiative, throwing herself on the king’s mercy and begging him to assure the succession of her son Francesco if his father died. Charles, who had more than the average man’s susceptibility to women as beautiful as Isabella, responded sympathetically. Though he promised nothing before moving on again, this time to Parma, Il Moro was left to brood in solitude about just how dependable a patron the king of France was likely to prove.

Charles resumed his effortless progress, with nothing to worry him except the costs of keeping his immense army paid, fed, and in tolerably good order. As city after city opened its gates without even a pretense of resistance, and in each new place Charles’s scouts marked the buildings where troops were to be billeted, it began to be said that the king was conquering Italy with a piece of chalk. The juggernaut rolled on, and as effortless victories followed one after another, the defensive confederation formed at Vicovaro began to crumble. Betrayals of Alexander and Alfonso came almost weekly. As early as September 18, when the French court was still at Asti awaiting the king’s recovery from smallpox, the Colonna had broken their chief’s promise to remain on the sidelines of the conflict at least where papal and Neapolitan territory were concerned. The cousins Fabrizio and Prospero Colonna launched a surprise attack on the Roman port of Ostia, which they had been forced to hand over to the pope earlier in the year after its governor, their patron Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, departed for France. By retaking Ostia they gave France’s warships control of the Tiber, without which Rome had no easy access to the sea. As they already controlled the main road connecting Rome to Naples, holding it in readiness for the French while blocking communications between Alexander and Alfonso, the Colonna now had the Vatican in a stranglehold.

If it is true as alleged that Ascanio Sforza persuaded the Colonna to commit this act of betrayal, the cardinal deserves credit for a tactical masterstroke. With the Colonna now positioned to do so much mischief so close to his kingdom, Alfonso II decided that he could not reinforce his son Ferrandino’s army in the Romagna. This left Ferrandino without the strength to keep the French from outflanking his army and seizing the mountain passes, and when this happened the Neapolitan army was so dangerously exposed that Alfonso ordered a general retreat. Thus the Florentines found themselves unsupported as the French bore down on them. Every setback seemed to lead to further setbacks, and the French flags flying over Ostia seemed to mock a humiliated and defenseless Pope Alexander.

Not even Ludovico Sforza could rejoice in the successes of the invasion he had instigated. When his nephew Duke Gian Galeazzo died on October 22, murder was so widely assumed that he found it necessary to send letters to his fellow princes, protesting his innocence. A supine Milanese parliament decreed that Ludovico and not Gian Galeazzo’s son Francesco was now duke, but the dire circumstances must have made this fulfillment of Il Moro’s lifelong dream much less sweet than he had expected.

In Florence, weakened by a long and inconclusive war to subdue the neighboring city of Pisa, Piero de’ Medici had even more to worry about than Il Moro. His decision to side with Naples in this crisis had been a reversal of long-standing Florentine policy, which traditionally favored France as a rich market for the city’s bankers and manufacturers. The new alignment came under increasing criticism as France imposed an embargo on Florence’s goods, causing immediate economic distress. As the French army approached, more and more influential Florentines openly questioned Piero’s judgment, questioning also the wisdom of leaving the city’s destiny in the hands of an inexperienced youth who, it was becoming obvious, was not nearly the equal of his late father Lorenzo. Piero’s position became alarming when news arrived that Charles’s mercenaries, having used false promises to extract a surrender from the defenders of the Florentine stronghold of Fivizzano, had put the entire garrison to death and subjected the town to the kind of scorched-earth sacking for which Rapallo had first made
them notorious. Florence seemed doomed to a similar fate, with Piero responsible.

Perhaps it was sheer desperation, or perhaps the memory of how Lorenzo the Magnificent had once saved Florence by journeying to Naples and putting himself at the mercy of the vicious Ferrante, that prompted Piero to venture forth in search of the French king. He found him at the end of October, at Sarzana near the port of La Spezia. Instead of talking terms as his father surely would have done, however, Piero simply prostrated himself before the misshapen little conqueror. He abjectly declared himself ready not only to ally with the invaders but to hand over to them much more than they would have been likely to demand of a less craven envoy. By the time Piero stopped talking, he had given Charles free access to Florence itself and every one of the city’s satellite strongpoints. He had even given Charles the strategic port of Livorno and, more shocking still, the city of Pisa, the control of which was considered economically and militarily essential by many leading Florentines. When the citizens of Florence learned of all this, their festering resentments, the inevitable result of generations of domination by a single family, erupted in communal rage.

Their anger was brought to white heat by the denunciations of an extraordinary figure who, though an outsider who had moved to Florence only five years earlier and had done so at the invitation of Lorenzo de’ Medici, had already established himself as the spokesman and de facto leader of the city’s numerous anti-Medici factions. This was Friar Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican priest and preacher whose energy and charisma were fueled by revulsion against the hedonism and materialism of the Italy of his day, a burning hatred of the Medici and the Renaissance papacy alike, and (his most attractive feature) a conviction that Italy’s people could and should rid themselves of rule by tyrants.

On the momentous day of November 9, 1494, when Piero de’ Medici and his family were expelled from Florence, Savonarola was not present. Instead he was in Pisa, where he had gone to represent the
signoria
of a new Florentine republic in welcoming the French invaders. Charles VIII was received as a liberator when he entered Pisa at the head of his army that day; the Pisans were in ecstasies at having been freed—or so they believed—from Florence’s hard rule. Rather oddly,
the envoy from Florence figured prominently in the festivities and took the opportunity to heap praise on the conqueror from the north. Charles, Savonarola declared, was the liberator whose arrival he had been predicting in his sermons, a messenger sent by God to cleanse Italy—wicked Florence especially, the papacy above all—of the corruption in which it had long been sunk. Of course he got an affectionate response from king and Pisans alike and upon returning to Florence was himself received as a hero, the man whose prophecies had proved accurate and who had restored both the city’s dignity and its old friendship with France.

When on November 17 Charles rode into Florence with Cardinal della Rovere at his side, they received a more mixed reception. Supporters of the Medici, especially those who resented what almost everyone was interpreting as Charles’s intervention on behalf of Pisan autonomy, looked on sullenly. But those who regarded the Medici as usurping tyrants, and Piero as a disaster, were jubilant at what they hoped would prove the dawning of a new era. Their joy was tamped down, however, when Charles revealed where his priorities lay.
He told the assembled citizens that he had entered their city not as a liberator but as a conqueror, that it was a matter of no interest to him whether they were governed by the Medici or the foes of the Medici, and that what he wanted from them was what Florence had a gift for producing in abundance: money.