The Borgias (46 page)

While the ruling families of Milan and Naples should have been frightened and undoubtedly were, for Cesare Borgia the new situation was rich in promise. He remained enthralled by the thought of a princess he had never met, Don Fadrique of Naples’s daughter Carlotta. What he knew of her made her seem the perfect bride: eldest child of a king whose only son was still a boy; great-granddaughter of a king of France; a lady-in-waiting at the French court, where she had been sent to be brought up when her mother died not long after her birth. The man who married her could be confident of becoming one of the leading lords of Naples and of being accepted into the French royal family. And only one life, that of a very young brother-in-law, would stand between Carlotta herself and the Neapolitan crown.

Soundings were taken in Naples, and the results were not encouraging: Don Fadrique showed no interest in marrying his daughter to Cesare. The fact that Cesare was a cardinal of the Church is itself sufficient to explain the king’s wariness, but beyond that the summer that Cesare had spent in Naples had obviously done nothing to enhance his attractiveness as a possible son-in-law. Whatever his opinion of Cesare personally, Don Fadrique probably thought that his father Ferrante and brother Alfonso II had bestowed quite enough Neapolitan riches on various Borgias, especially in connection with Sancia’s marriage to Jofrè. But with a new king of France now in the picture, and Carlotta virtually that king’s ward, Don Fadrique’s feelings would not necessarily decide the issue. If Louis could be won over, Don Fadrique might find it difficult not to go along.

And there were ways of winning Louis over. The pope, as it happened, had the power to grant something that the French king wanted at least as much as he wanted Milan, probably even more: the annulment of his marriage. Alexander for his part, having by this time digested whatever regrets he may have felt over Cesare’s determination to abandon his clerical career, made it known to Louis that he wanted essentially nothing for himself but several big things for Cesare. He wanted Carlotta, plus a high place in the French nobility, plus sources
of income commensurate with that place. Pope and king alike could see that the ingredients were in place for a thoroughly satisfactory arrangement. Soon they were well along with intricate, and secret, negotiations.

Rather oddly, it was Cesare’s determination to make Carlotta his wife, Alexander’s acquiescence, and above all Don Fadrique’s reluctance that decided Lucrezia’s fate. The pope’s representatives in Naples reported that, whatever his doubts about Cesare, Don Fadrique was quite open to a marriage of the cardinal’s sister to his late brother Alfonso’s illegitimate son and namesake, the brother of Sancia Borgia. He was more than just open, actually; to Fadrique such a marriage seemed an opportunity, a necessary gesture of goodwill, a way of tempering his rejection of Cesare and preventing it from spoiling his relations with the papal court. Cesare for his part must have seen it as a step toward winning Carlotta, and the pope was agreeable. In preparation for a wedding young Alfonso was elevated to duke of Bisceglie, and Don Fadrique agreed to Alexander’s request that Lucrezia never be required to live in Naples so long as he remained alive. (That the aging pontiff made this request is the most poignant testimony we possess to the neediness in his attachment to Lucrezia.) A simple wedding was performed in Rome in July 1498, with a lack of pomp that was in sharp contrast to the bride’s first wedding.

It was fortuitous, considering the cynical calculations that brought it about, that the marriage turned out to be a happy one. Bride and groom were well suited: Alfonso charming, cheerful, handsome, and almost exactly Lucrezia’s age, Lucrezia a well-bred, intelligent, beguilingly good-natured beauty. Together they settled into a life of easeful enjoyment at the center of a social set of high-born young Romans in which Alfonso’s sister Sancia, who with her husband Jofrè had been allowed to return from Squillace, also figured prominently. The House of Borgia and the House of Aragon were now connected not only through Jofrè’s and Lucrezia’s marriages but also because, back in Spain, the late Juan’s little son the third duke of Gandía was related to Ferdinand and Isabella through his mother. One more such union, of Cesare and Princess Carlotta, must have seemed an entirely realistic objective. It would require nothing more than a single repetition of an established pattern.

What next commanded attention was Louis XII’s annulment. He
had an admirable queen—she would be canonized a saint four and a half centuries after her death—but his wish to be rid of her is not hard to understand. She was Jeanne of France, so called because her father was King Louis XI; it was at his direction that she had been married to her cousin Louis duke of Orléans when both were about twelve years old. The marriage was amicable enough though childless and devoid of passion, but the unexpected death of Jeanne’s younger brother Charles VIII had not only made her husband king but given him reason to question whether the union should continue. At issue was not only Louis’s new status as a monarch without a son and heir but the equally big question of whether the great duchy of Brittany was going to remain part of France or revert to what it had been for centuries, a separate and sovereign principality.

Brittany had become loosely and not irrevocably united with France as a result of the 1491 marriage of Charles VIII and Anne of Brittany, sole living child of Brittany’s last duke. That marriage appears to have been a surprisingly happy one; the dignified, devout, and rather beautiful Anne loved her gnomish little husband despite his physical and moral deficiencies, and in spite also of his promiscuity and his practice of sharing their bedchamber with his groomsmen and hunting dogs. But when all four of their children died in infancy and then Charles met his end on a handball court, France lost its claim to Brittany, which reverted to being an independent state with Anne as its sovereign. The only way for Louis XII to recover it, and keep it out of other hands, was to marry Anne himself. Which was not possible if he already had a wife. Which is why he wanted something only the Church could grant.

Alexander set out not only to accommodate Louis, but to do so in accordance with the letter of the law. In July 1498 he established a tribunal to hear the king’s case, signaling his eagerness to be helpful by appointing as one of its two leaders Archbishop Georges d’Amboise of Rouen, a trusted friend of Louis and for years his chief minister. The proceedings, however, soon turned unpleasant, a precursor of what would happen a generation later when Henry VIII of England demanded that the Church rid him of Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Catherine of Aragon. When Louis testified that Jeanne’s deformities had made it impossible to consummate their marriage, the queen tearfully denied that this was true.

While the commissioners continued with the tedious business of assembling evidence and hearing arguments in France and Rome, pope and king entered into a secret agreement that shows how much Louis was prepared to pay. With respect to Cesare’s matrimonial hopes, he would promise only to encourage Carlotta to consent, insisting that everything must depend, in the end, on her doing so freely.
But beyond that, he promised everything the pope had asked and more: for Cesare the title duke of Valentinois; the lordship of two French counties that together would bring him twenty thousand gold ducats per annum; a royal subsidy in the same amount; command of a thousand or more mounted soldiers to be maintained at royal expense; and the lordship of Asti as soon as France won possession of Milan. These were extraordinary benefactions. And Louis capped them by offering to make Cesare a member of his hyperexclusive Order of St. Michel, a kind of French Round Table that he regarded as the highest honor within his power to bestow.

It is improbable that the king disgorged this much bounty simply to get an annulment. His lawyers would have advised him that the strength of his case made such generosity unnecessary. Quite apart from the question of consummation, the extreme youth of both parties and the fact that they had been ordered to marry by the king made it impossible that their union had involved free and responsible commitment on either side. Louis’s largesse is likely to have had more to do with his ambitions in Italy and his memory of the difficulties that Alexander’s refusal to cooperate had created for Charles VIII. As little as the king was demanding at this stage, Alexander must have been aware that he was likely to demand a good deal more later, when he returned with an army to Italy. The agreement was, not explicitly but by clear implication, a reversal of papal policy, an abandonment of the consistency with which Alexander had refused to acquiesce in Charles VIII’s invasion and opposed possible future incursions. Spain’s rulers, understandably enough, interpreted the whole arrangement as a betrayal. Though Alexander had not repudiated his decades-old friendship with the Spanish crown, he definitely had put it at risk.

One nagging detail remained to be addressed: Cesare was pursuing a wife and becoming a vassal of the king of France while still a member of the College of Cardinals. He needed to get out from under his red
hat. On August 14, 1498, he donned the full regalia of a prince of the Church for the last time—that in itself was a dramatic gesture, Cesare being rarely seen in clerical attire—and appeared before the pope and his fellow prelates. He asked to be allowed to resign from the college and revert to the lay world. Unique though this request was in the centuries-long history of the Sacred College, there was no obstacle in canon law to its being granted, Cesare in his five years as a cardinal never having taken the perpetual vows that priestly ordination entailed. The reasons he gave for requesting release were disarmingly persuasive. He simply told his colleagues what was obviously true: that he had never wanted an ecclesiastical career, had not been consulted before being placed on the path to one while still a child, and knew himself to be so utterly unsuited to life as a churchman that he could only remain in it at the risk of his immortal soul. The only objections came from those few members of the Sacred College who regarded themselves as being under more obligation to Ferdinand and Isabella than to Alexander, and for whom it would have been imprudent to cooperate in the transformation of a Spanish cardinal into a French duke. The college voted to leave the decision with the pope, and so the deed was done. Cesare was permitted to remove himself from a life of total and permanent security, giving up benefices generating an income of some 35,000 ducats annually, and hurl himself into an unforeseeable future.

Consequences followed quickly. Alexander, knowing how angry Ferdinand and Isabella would be when they learned of this, attempted to placate them by granting very nearly the only thing they wanted that he, as pope, had it in his power to grant. He ceded to them increased authority over the Church in Spain and their many other possessions including those in the New World. Most momentously, and with famously tragic consequences, he freed them to use the Spanish Inquisition as they wished and so to intensify their persecution of Muslims, Jews, and whichever Christians they chose to find suspect. Alexander’s rapprochement with France also dealt a near-fatal blow to whatever remained of friendship between Rome and Milan, opening up a wide gulf between himself on one side and Ludovico and Ascanio Sforza on the other. The Colonna and Orsini were so alarmed by these developments that they brought an end to a vicious little war in which they had
been fighting each other for territory, formed an alliance, and threw in with Milan. Even Naples soon joined them, Lucrezia’s marriage to the duke of Bisceglie being not nearly sufficient to overcome Don Fadrique’s fear of the impending French invasion. The willingness of four such improbable parties to form an alliance showed just how frightened all of them were by the rapprochement of Rome and Louis XII. Alexander tried to reassure them, insisting that his understanding with France was strictly a personal matter, limited to finding a place in the world for Cesare and changing nothing politically. He cannot have expected to be believed, but his words created just enough uncertainty to buy a little time. Maintaining lines of communication with Milan and Naples, and making certain that the existence of those lines became the worst-kept secret in Europe, enabled him to keep Louis from becoming too complacent as well.

The atmosphere in Rome grew thick with tension. On All Saints’ Day, when Alexander said mass in public at St. Peter’s Basilica, he did so behind a shield of armed Spanish guards. Days later, in consistory, Ascanio Sforza accused him of risking the destruction of all Italy by connecting himself to France.
“Are you aware, monsignor,” a scornful Alexander replied to his onetime friend, “that it was your brother who invited the French into Italy?” An even sharper exchange took place three days before Christmas, when envoys freshly arrived from Ferdinand and Isabella warned the pope that if he continued on his present course, he was going to find himself answering to a general council of the Church. Both sides spoke with brutal frankness, and both must have been startled by the things being said. The Spaniards accused Alexander of simony and of nepotism beyond the bounds of reason. Alexander went further, declaring that Ferdinand and Isabella were usurpers with no right to their thrones. Told that God had punished him with the death of the duke of Gandía, the pope retorted that God had punished Ferdinand and Isabella far more severely in taking their only son.

Such intemperate words were so untypical of the usually unflappable Alexander that one shocked observer attributed them to a secret fear that the deal with France had been a colossal mistake. Things escalated from there, with Portugal soon joining Spain in threatening to summon a council and, by implication, elect a new pope. Louis XII sent assurances that there was nothing to fear—that the agreement binding
Spain to France made it impossible for Ferdinand to act on his threats. All the same, the hostility of the Spanish royals must have made Alexander wonder if he had made a perilously wrong turn. That his actions in coming to terms with France had been so widely at variance with his own political instincts is a good measure of just how much influence Cesare now had over him.