The Borgias (42 page)

Guidobaldo da Montefeltro was away from Bracciano at this time, recuperating from an injury. At the approach of the relief force, Juan Borgia broke off the siege—probably a sensible move—and removed his artillery to safety behind the walls of the town of Anguillara. When Guidobaldo rejoined him, they set out in search of the enemy, coming upon them near Soriano on January 24, 1497. D’Alviano and his Orsini kin, as it happened, were spoiling for a fight, knowing as they did that Virginio had died in Naples nine days before. Perhaps they had already heard the rumor—it is not impossible that they
started
the rumor—that Alexander had ordered him poisoned.

The battle that ensued, though hard-fought on both sides, cost the pope’s young dukes everything they had gained over the preceding months and brought their campaign to an ignominious end. Guidobaldo was taken prisoner, Juan Borgia ran for Rome after suffering a slight wound, and their army was scattered. The cause of the disaster was a blunder by the usually competent Fabrizio Colonna, who by advancing too aggressively had left his flank exposed to the savagely aggressive Vitellozzo Vitelli. The result was humiliation for Guidobaldo, who found himself being held for ransom; for Juan, who became a laughingstock because of his flight; and above all for the pope. For the victors, who found themselves back in control of the countryside north of Rome, it was bittersweet revenge.

Alexander reacted by doing what he would have been wise to do in the first place: he sent an appeal to Naples for Gonsalvo to come north and take command. Other developments, however, soon made a resumption of the offensive impossible. On January 17 the latest conflict between France and Spain was suspended by a truce, and in order not to jeopardize it, Ferdinand began pressing Rome to stop making war on King Charles’s Orsini minions. Venice meanwhile wanted to avoid French involvement in a dispute it was having with Naples over certain Adriatic ports—a dispute in which Alexander was siding with Ferrandino, urging him to stand firm—and so it too applied what pressure it could to get the pope to desist. Even the Orsini were eager for an end to hostilities, being satisfied with the fruits of their victory at Soriano and having had a taste of what the Spanish were capable of when under Gonsalvo’s command. Alexander yielded, if regretfully. He accepted from the Orsini an indemnity of fifty thousand gold ducats along with their promise to refrain from offensive action. In return he released the Orsini still held prisoner in Naples—the deceased Virginio’s vengeful son Gian Giordano among them. He handed over the properties the Orsini had earlier lost to Guidobaldo and Juan. On balance, the Orsini had survived Alexander’s offensive with their strength undiminished and their freedom of action unimpaired.

Gonsalvo arrived in Rome four days after the signing of the settlement. Rather than allowing his long journey to go for naught and his talents to go unused, Alexander dispatched him and Juan as co-commanders to the port of Ostia, which was now one of France’s few outposts south of Genoa and the last bit of Italy still professing loyalty to Giuliano della Rovere. Its capture came within a couple of weeks and was important. It restored the River Tiber to Rome’s control, so that for the first time in two years food and other necessities could be imported by ship and barge. Alexander took personal possession of Ostia amid great celebration, using the occasion to declare all of Cardinal della Rovere’s benefices forfeit and to remove his brother as prefect of Rome. The cardinal himself was now in permanent exile, serving as archbishop of Avignon under the protection of the French crown, biding his time and dreaming of revenge.

The only difficulties of the Ostia campaign involved Juan Borgia and rose out of the abrasiveness of his personality. He clashed almost violently
with Gonsalvo, who was more than twice his age and an immeasurably more capable and respected soldier. Gonsalvo developed such hearty contempt for his young co-commander that later, during Easter observances in Rome, he refused to accept a palm from the pope’s hands because this modest honor had been conferred on Juan first. Lucrezia Borgia’s husband, Giovanni Sforza, also was at Ostia, having finally and with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm consented to leave his palace at Pesaro and contribute his troops to the pope’s wars. He too was seen to have a heated dispute with
the duke of Gandía, the cause of which is not known. The duke had a talent for giving offense and did more than all his siblings to make the people of Rome hate the Spaniards among them. If Alexander had any awareness of this, there is no evidence that he cared.

The recovery of Ostia coincided with the signing of a truce between the Holy League—which at this point meant, in practical terms, Venice and Rome only—and France. Military operations thus came to an end at last, and Italy entered upon a half-year of general tranquillity. Once again Alexander was free to turn his attention where he wished, and he began to make his family his first priority to such an extent that in time he would appear to be almost in the grip of an obsession. He did so first—it seems fitting almost to the point of inevitability—in connection with the crown of Naples.

It happened that Ferrandino, only twenty-seven years old, had unexpectedly died some months before. This energetic and courageous young monarch, recently wed to an aunt with whom he was passionately in love (she was a daughter of his grandfather Ferrante but several years younger than her nephew-husband nonetheless), probably fell victim to malaria. His passing is easily seen as a tragedy for the House of Aragon, as by all accounts he was free of the most appalling traits of his father and grandfather. In fact, however, the uncle who succeeded him, Alfonso II’s younger brother Federico or Don Fadrique, was at least as impressive and less alarmingly impulsive. The third new king of Naples in just three years, Fadrique was in firm control of his throne, thanks largely to the presence of Gonsalvo’s Spanish troops. But he needed to be crowned, this could only be done by his liege lord the pope or someone deputized by the pope, and his coronation was now conspicuously overdue. No one was surprised, therefore, when Alexander
announced in consistory that the time had come for one of the cardinals to go to Naples and conduct the necessary formalities.

Eyebrows went up, however, when the pope announced his choice: Cardinal Cesare. Twenty-two years old at most, three years a cardinal, Cesare was known for nothing except the dashing figure he cut in his pursuit of pleasure and such boyish exploits as his escape from Charles VIII. The conferring of such a prestigious assignment on a youth who made no pretense at taking his clerical status seriously was almost a provocation. It was resented by his older colleagues, the ambitious as well as the distinguished, those sensitive to the proprieties as well as those thinking mostly of the rich gifts a ruler of Naples could be expected to bestow upon whoever anointed him as king.

A bigger shock followed just days later, when the cardinals were again called together and informed of the pope’s newest plans for Juan duke of Gandía. Still only six months from his flight from the battlefield at Soriano, Juan was to be invested with the duchy of Benevento, an ancient papal fief only some fifty miles north of Naples and, with its great palace and fortifications, an anchor of papal strength in the south. He was also made lord of the cities of Terracina and Pontecorvo, and all these places were to be inheritable in perpetuity by his legitimate male descendants. The kingdom of Naples had historical claims to these places and disputed the pope’s right to bestow them on anyone, but Alexander’s timing was impeccable: Don Fadrique’s need for papal investiture was certain to deter him from objecting strongly. Only one cardinal, Pope Pius II’s nephew Francesco Piccolomini, spoke openly in opposition to Alexander’s alienation of so much papal territory for the benefit not only of an undistinguished lay member of the Borgia family but of Borgias yet unborn. Gandía being a nephew-by-marriage of Spain’s ruling monarchs, the Sacred College’s Spanish contingent (to which Alexander had added seven members in the five years since his election) were untroubled to see him treated so generously. Though the Italian cardinals were inured to nepotism, the acquiescence of almost all of them makes it impossible not to wonder if Alexander had used bullying tactics to assure their silence.

As for Juan, there is no sure way of deciding how much credence to give to the many contemptuous descriptions that have come down to us in the chronicles of the time. The number and unanimity of these
descriptions make it necessary to accept them as accurate reflections, to some considerable extent, of his character and conduct. Without question he was a pleasure-loving young libertine, capable of displaying the Borgia charm but also of making himself insufferable. The clashes with Gonsalvo and with Giovanni Sforza that we noted earlier were far from unique; a dispute with Cardinal Ascanio Sforza flew so completely out of control that before it ended, their retainers were killing one another in the streets. If it is unnecessary to dismiss the duke as irredeemably vicious, in the face of the available evidence it is pointless even to wonder if he might be an innocent victim of partisan slander. Possibly he had been spoiled as a child; fatherless, he inherited his brother’s dukedom unexpectedly and at an early age and from that point forward was immensely rich, immensely privileged, and perhaps excessively indulged. His story may be, at least in part, the familiar one of too much too soon.

The many powerful enemies that Juan had made in the year since his return from Spain, and his ability to remain the pope’s favorite in spite of his too-obvious faults, provide the background for one of the most intriguing murder mysteries in all of history. On the evening of June 14, 1497, at a vineyard in Rome, Vannozza Borgia held a going-away party for her son Cesare, who was to depart for his great assignment in Naples within a few days. Juan was among those in attendance, and he was accompanied by a figure in whose company he had been seen repeatedly in recent weeks, a man whose face was concealed behind a mask and whose identity appears to have been unknown to the other party-goers. (Going about masked was somehow not as bizarre a practice in the Italy of the Renaissance as it seems today; it would become almost standard practice for Cesare, especially after his good looks were marred by syphilis.) Late in the evening, as everyone was going home, Juan rode off into the dark streets with his masked companion, the two of them mounted on the same mule with a manservant walking beside. When the three came to a square, Juan told the servant to wait there one hour, and then to go home if his master had not returned. The duke and the masked man then went on their way, the latter to remain a mystery forever, the former never to be seen alive again.

The next morning, when it was discovered that Juan had not returned to the papal palace, no one was concerned. He was notorious for his nocturnal, mainly amorous adventures, and as the day advanced
and he failed to appear, it was assumed that, as had happened before, he was holed up in the room of some paramour, unwilling for the sake of her reputation or perhaps his own to emerge before dark. When night fell and he had still not returned, Alexander became worried. Search parties were sent out. They found the duke’s mule, its trappings disarranged. They also found the manservant, gravely wounded but unable to provide any helpful information. At last someone turned up a clue: the statement of a Slovenian watchman to the effect that, in the middle of the night, he had seen five men dump a body into the Tiber and weigh it down with rocks when it floated to the surface. Asked why he had not reported this, he replied that in the course of many nights standing guard over cargo barges he had seen any number of corpses deposited in the river, and that until now no one had ever seemed to care.

Fishermen were deployed to drag the river bottom. One of them hooked the dead body of the duke and pulled it out of the mud. It bore nine deep stab wounds, it was still dressed in the costly garments that Juan had worn to his mother’s party, and one of its pockets contained a purse fat with gold. The impossibility of believing that Juan had been killed by robbers added urgency to the question of who had done the deed, and why. As in all the best mysteries, there was an excess of plausible suspects.
Ascanio Sforza for one: his recent dispute with Juan had already had fatal consequences. Lucrezia’s husband for another: like his cousin Ascanio, Giovanni Sforza had clashed recently and almost violently with Juan, and Ludovico il Moro’s reconciliation with Charles of France had made Giovanni’s position in Rome so excruciatingly awkward that he believed his life to be in danger. On Good Friday he had fled Rome, first returning to his home base at Pesaro and later proceeding to Milan, where he asked but did not receive help from his cousins Ludovico il Moro and Cardinal Ascanio. The brothers were unwilling to offend Alexander and pressed Giovanni to obey the pope’s order to return to Rome. By then, however, there was no point in returning. Lucrezia had gone into seclusion at the San Sisto convent outside Rome, and Alexander had declared his intention to have her marriage annulled. Though neither Ascanio nor Giovanni was in Rome at the time of Juan’s disappearance, both certainly had the means to arrange his murder.

Also to be considered was young Guidobaldo duke of Urbino, a gentle,
scholarly soul but burning with resentment at being blamed for the defeat at Soriano and left to pay his own ransom in order to win his release. Plus the men of all the families, some of them noble, whose wives and daughters Juan had seduced or targeted for seduction. That line of inquiry brought even the youngest of the Borgia brothers, Jofrè prince of Squillace, into the circle of suspects. He was living in Rome once again, and his wife Sancia was among Juan’s numberless paramours (and Cesare’s). Finally, most worthy of suspicion of all, were the Orsini. It was Juan who had been sent to destroy them, Juan who was to have been given their lands when his mission was accomplished, and Juan who could be expected to take up arms against them once again whenever Alexander felt ready to make another try. Rome was thick with Orsini who were capable of committing murder.