The Borgias (41 page)

A Shattering Loss

Charles VIII’s withdrawal to France did not bring peace to Italy. It did not even mark the end of the French invasion. The thousands of troops that the king left behind were a violation of Neapolitan sovereignty and a threat to Il Regno’s neighbors.

The Italians in attendance at Charles’s court, meanwhile, reported that he was making no secret of his intention to invade again in the not very distant future. He was even said to be talking openly, now that he was no longer exposed to the force of Alexander VI’s personality, of placing Cardinal della Rovere on the papal throne.

Though the Holy League had not disintegrated in the aftermath of Ludovico il Moro’s defection, Charles’s return to France had deprived it of its reason for existing; few of the Italian powers saw further need for cooperation. Ferrandino of Naples was an exception. With the French holding a number of his strongholds, and the weakness of his once-great kingdom having been revealed to the world, he was in desperate need of friends. Only Venice was both able and willing to help, however, and it did so only after Ferrandino ceded it the seaports of Brindisi, Trani, Gallipoli, and Otranto. Alexander VI was another exception. In all of Italy he was the sole champion of unity and of unqualified opposition to incursions by outside powers. He like Ferrandino looked first to Venice for support, and he too found the Venetians focused on their own affairs. When he looked to Florence, he saw cause for alarm. Savonarola
and the city’s republican government remained openly loyal to France, an inducement to Charles to return. Finding a way to sever that connection became one of the fundamentals of papal policy.

Despite all the turmoil and uncertainty, Alexander had reason to feel confident. He had won much respect, both in Rome and elsewhere, for the adroitness and persistence of his opposition to Charles VIII. And he was far from isolated; Milan and Venice were with him in supporting Pisa’s rejection of Florentine domination. What mattered more, he still had the friendship of Spain—could count on it more surely than ever, because of his refusal to submit to the French king even when at his mercy. This friendship was a sword with more than one edge, however. On the positive side it had become a source of security, because Ferdinand and Isabella were still building up their forces in Sicily and making it known that they would never accept French control of Naples—or for that matter of Rome. Less comfortingly, the growing power of the Spaniards in Italy created the possibility that they might decide to use that power in a campaign of conquest of their own. Ferdinand was ambitious and crafty, and he had never concealed his conviction that Naples was rightfully his.

Against this background, Alexander must have been less than enthusiastic when he learned that Spanish troops were being moved in substantial numbers to the Neapolitan mainland, and that they had been put under the command of one of the most fearsome generals of the age, Gonzalo Hernández de Córdoba, known as Gonsalvo and destined to be immortalized as the Great Captain. He was a veteran of the long, bitter campaign that had ended in 1492 with the expulsion of the Muslims from Granada, and he was formidably smart and tough. As an ally of Ferrandino he was certain to be invaluable. But if ever used to plant the banners of Aragon and Castile in Italy, he would become at least as big a problem as the French. He, and his master and mistress in Spain, needed careful management. Alexander alone was attempting to manage them constructively, in such a way as to maintain the autonomy and integrity of the peninsula.

It is remarkable, in light of his later conduct, how little attention Alexander gave, throughout the invasion crisis and its immediate aftermath, to the fortunes of his young relatives. That whole agenda appears to have been set aside. With the crisis behind him, however, he was
freed to turn his attention to other matters, and the matters that interested him most were those young relatives and conditions in the Papal States. One thing in particular rankled, and it was an issue with deep roots: the power, and the troublesome behavior, of the Orsini. Though the Colonna had accepted employment with Gonsalvo and Ferrandino after being discharged by the retreating Charles VIII, and though they had been reconciled with Rome as a result, the old warhorse Virginio Orsini followed an insultingly different course. First he declined an offer to take command of the Holy League’s armies, possibly because accepting would have put him on the same side as the Colonna, more likely because he received a better offer from the count of Montpensier, the hard-pressed viceroy whom King Charles had left behind in Naples. Returning to Il Regno at the head of a force drawn from several branches of his family, Virginio settled in for what he undoubtedly hoped would be a long and lucrative conflict of the traditional Italian kind.

What made all this intolerable from Alexander’s perspective was that Virginio, as lord of the great lakeside stronghold of Bracciano north of Rome, was a papal vassal and therefore—supposedly—subject to Rome. His flouting of his feudal obligations, if no more than typical of the high-handed manner in which the Roman barons had been dealing with their supposed overlords for centuries, served as a galling reminder of the disorder in the Papal States and even in the streets of Rome. Wherever the clans dominated there was thuggery instead of law, the caprices of autocrats rather than anything deserving to be called proper government. And Virginio was the whole problem personified.

The papal army had deteriorated during the reign of Innocent VIII, and almost from the week of his election Alexander had begun spending to rebuild it. Later, drawing on the lessons of the invasion, he began investing in artillery. Thus he was prepared to take action when, early in 1496, he thought he saw an opportunity to break the Orsini once and for all. Undoubtedly he intended more than this; his ultimate objective could only have been to subdue all the baronial clans. But it would have been folly to take on all of them at once, and Virginio’s high-handed insolence made the Orsini the right place to start. Nor was this pope willing to follow the practice of his predecessors and use one
local clan to subdue another; instead he summoned Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, son and successor of the great Duke Federico of Urbino, to take command of the papal troops. Guidobaldo was a safe choice: the domains he had inherited from his father were far away and separated from Rome by the Apennines, so distant that the thought of augmenting them with the lands of the Orsini could only have seemed absurd.

At the same time Alexander sent word to Juan de Borja, the young duke of Gandía, urging him to hasten back to Italy from Spain, become Giovanni Borgia once again, and accept appointment as the Vatican’s captain-general. Alexander saw a double-barreled opportunity: a chance to neutralize the Orsini and raise the status of his own family at a single stroke. By merging the two objectives he put his reign on a momentously new course.

Juan, whose late brother Pedro Luis had become the first duke of Gandía partly on the basis of his achievements as a soldier (his inherited wealth had also been a factor, along with Ferdinand and Isabella’s wish to bring him into the royal family by marrying him to their cousin), had no real military credentials of his own. Nevertheless the pope placed him rather than Montefeltro at the head of the campaign against the Orsini, and he can have had no other reason for doing so than the simple fact that Juan was a Borgia. Somebody loyal would be needed to manage the Orsini properties once they had been reclaimed, and Alexander decided to give that job to Juan as well. Who else, in the circus of Italian dynastic politics, could he possibly trust? Even within the family, who but Juan? Jofrè, even if he had been a stronger character, was too young to be a possibility. All the other male Borgias of note, Cesare included, were churchmen. The pope appears to have taken it for granted that the young duke had somehow grown up while in Spain or that, if he remained capable of atrociously immature behavior, that was somehow not going to matter.

We see here the first clear manifestation of Alexander’s defining weakness as a man and as pontiff: his growing and soon all-but-unrestrained willingness to subordinate everything else to his favorites. No doubt he remembered how Calixtus III had turned to him and his brother under similar circumstances and had increased his effectiveness as pope by doing so. If the increasing extremes to which he carried his nepotism might to any extent be rationally explained, the
explanation must surely have to do with the perception that Juan and his siblings, if empowered, could become Alexander’s most effective tools in the pursuit of his policy objectives.

The war on the Orsini began in the south, before Juan’s arrival in Italy, and at the start it was impressively successful. This was thanks to the participation of Gonsalvo the Great Captain, who from his new base at Naples set out in pursuit of Virginio and the viceroy Montpensier. With characteristic energy he drove them from one redoubt to another until, by the end of June, he had them bottled up in the town of Atella in the southern province of Basilicata. After a month under siege Montpensier offered a deal: he would surrender if a relief force did not come to his rescue by the time another month had passed, with the understanding that he and his men would then be allowed to return to France. Meanwhile hostilities could cease. Gonsalvo, having provided an early demonstration of his ability to outthink, outmaneuver, and outfight the French as well as Virginio’s Italians, confident of his ability to deal with a relief force in the unlikely event that one appeared, was happy to agree. He was wise to do so: Montpensier, his troops ravaged by disease and desperately short of water, gave up halfway through the period of truce. Though Montpensier was set free as agreed (only to die shortly afterward), Pope Alexander sent an urgent appeal to Ferrandino not to let Virginio go. The king did as asked. Virginio, his son Gian Giordano, and a number of their kinsmen were held as prisoners.

In Rome, meanwhile, a separate northern campaign was still being prepared. When Juan landed at Civitavecchia on the coast, he was escorted in state to Rome, where after a formal reception his brother Cardinal Cesare showed him to the apartments that had been prepared for him in the papal palace. Almost three more months passed before all was deemed to be in readiness. During those months Juan appears to have made himself generally despised, not least by his new comrades in arms.
One of them would remember him as “a very mean young man, full of false ideas of grandeur and bad thoughts, haughty, cruel and unreasonable.” Virginio Orsini remained a prisoner in Naples, but his brother-in-law Bartolomeo d’Alviano managed to escape. He made his way northward to Virginio’s main stronghold of Bracciano, where he organized a defense against the assault that everyone knew to be impending.

One wonders if Pope Alexander, usually so circumspect, gave any thought to the risks he was running in entrusting his campaign to the two young dukes—neither of them yet twenty-five, Juan barely twenty—who knelt before him on October 26 to receive his blessing and with it the command of the papal army. Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, heir to one of the greatest military names in Italy, was intelligent, refined, and civilized—an
almost
perfect Renaissance prince. He had limited experience of warfare, however, and time would show him to have few of his late father’s gifts. Only the belief that blood will out, that the apple never falls far from the tree, can explain his selection as second in command of the expedition that was about to begin. Juan himself, the newly anointed captain-general, had less experience than Guidobaldo and even less to recommend him. When he rode out of Rome that day at the head of his army, the banners of Church and pope unfurled above his head, he was utterly unprepared for what lay ahead.

The question has to be asked: is it credible that Pope Alexander would have taken such a risk for, bestowed so much favor on, not a son but a nephew only? Yes is the only possible answer—an unqualified yes. And the evidence is as simple as it is undeniable: the fact that so many of Alexander’s predecessors had done exactly the same thing. Sometimes the risk paid off handsomely; this was nowhere as true as in the case of Calixtus III and young Rodrigo Borgia. More often the results were catastrophic; for an example it is necessary to look no further back than to one of the popes Rodrigo served—to Sixtus IV and his nephew Girolamo.

As for
why
, we have already considered how difficult it could be for a pope to find trustworthy agents, and how his own early life had been an object lesson in the potential value of papal nephews in consolidating the Vatican’s power and extending its reach. Beyond that, it is possible to suspect that even a man as robust as Alexander VI, without wife or children and perhaps susceptible to loneliness as old age descends upon him, might respond gratefully to the presence of four attractive and attentive young relatives at his court and in his life.

In the early going, the two young dukes did well. In short order ten Orsini castles were taken, and the papal army continued to advance. As the end of the year approached, only three strongholds, all of them in the heart of Orsini country at Lake Bracciano, remained to be taken.
Isola then fell, followed by Trevignano, so that only the majestically high-towered Bracciano Castle remained in Orsini hands. Virginio’s father Napoleone had strengthened and modernized this fortress in the 1480s, adapting it to withstand artillery. Now its defense was in the capable hands of Virginio’s sister Bartolomea d’Alviano and her husband Bartolomeo, an experienced soldier recently escaped from imprisonment in Naples and now acting as the family’s de facto military chief. Their ability to hold out was in doubt, however, until in the depths of winter help suddenly arrived in the form of troops led by Virginio’s illegitimate son Carlo, his cousin Giulio Orsini, and their henchman Vitellozzo Vitelli, tyrant lord of Città di Castello. The three had been in Provence in the service of Charles VIII when word reached them of the pope’s offensive, and the king had given them money with which to ride to the rescue. Giuliano della Rovere had come with them, desperate to make certain that the pope’s campaign failed.