The Borgias (48 page)

The pope’s act, if shocking, was entirely lawful, the lords in question being not only without legitimacy in many cases but years behind in paying tribute to Rome. Nor was it unjustified, when one considers the hard methods employed by most of those same lords to maintain control of the places they ruled, and the problems that their lawlessness created for Italy at large.

No words inscribed on a sheet of vellum, however, were going to get them to surrender control. That was going to require force. Force that would be applied by Valentino.

16

The Landscape Changes

Fourteen ninety-nine changed everything.

It transformed Louis XII’s place in the world. His effortless conquest of the great duchy of Milan elevated him, seemingly overnight, from a kind of political abstraction, a fearsome but remote potential threat, into the master of northern Italy. Suddenly he was
the
power that no one north of Naples could dare defy.

His liking for the bold young man he had made duke of Valentinois, and his appreciation of how much trouble Pope Alexander had spared him by not opposing his incursion into Italy, transformed Louis in another way as well. He became—within limits defined by his perception of his own strategic interests—a willing patron of the Borgias. This in turn transformed the pope’s position, giving him more freedom of action than he had previously known. That freedom, as things turned out, would be used mainly for Cesare’s benefit, as he pursued his dreams of greatness.

For Alexander and Cesare alike, the next step was obvious. The time had come for a new offensive against the warlords of the Papal States, with Cesare in command this time. For Alexander, removing or at least taming the warlords was the only way of achieving control of the Church’s domains, a goal that had eluded his predecessors for centuries. Cesare’s ultimate objective could scarcely have been more ambitious without bringing his sanity into question. It was to carve out of
the Papal States, for himself, a principality substantial enough to place him among the great men of Italy—not just to become a petty tyrant ruling over one or two small cities like Caterina Sforza or Vitellozzo Vitelli, but to assemble a state on an equal level with the Urbino of the Montefeltri and the Ferrara of the Este, conceivably with Florence or even Milan and Venice.

What made this dream feasible was Louis of France’s presence in northern Italy and his courting of the Borgias, his willingness to trade his support for theirs. This gave Rome a strength—albeit a largely borrowed strength—that it had barely possessed since the time, seven hundred years before, when Charlemagne and his father had made themselves masters of Italy and shared their conquests with the popes of the time. As for the fact that, to become a
legitimate
ruler in the Papal States, Cesare would have to accept subordinate status as a vassal of the pope, there was so little reason to object that it didn’t matter. Even the kings of Naples were papal vassals, and they had rarely been inconvenienced as a result.

Alexander and Cesare made no move until Louis was comfortably settled in the north of Italy and therefore in a relaxed and magnanimous frame of mind, at which point they secured his approval of their plans and were able to start making things happen. They made them happen quickly. In November, barely a month after Louis’s triumphal entry into Milan, Alexander made a fast grab at some low-hanging fruit, seizing the lands and castles of the Gaetani, a family considerably less powerful than the Orsini or the Colonna. The Gaetani holdings lay along the frontier where the Papal States abutted Naples and had considerable strategic value because the main highway connecting Rome and Naples ran through them. Though Alexander’s grounds for declaring them forfeit were unarguably sound—the Gaetani had allied themselves with Naples when Rome was at odds with Ferrante, thereby failing in a fundamental feudal obligation—such offenses had been routine among the vicars of the Papal States much longer than anyone could remember. Only the support of the French king made it possible for him to proceed. Without that support, without the fact that everyone knew of that support, other and more powerful clans almost certainly would have come to the defense of the Gaetani. Don Fadrique of Naples would likely have intervened as well.

The most surprising aspect of the attack on the Gaetani was not the fact that Alexander attempted it but his way of disposing of the seized properties. He
sold
them, and to, of all people, Lucrezia Borgia. She by this time was reunited with her husband, had just weeks before given birth to a son they named Rodrigo, and in the aftermath of her good performance at Spoleto was now in charge of the papal city of Nepi as well. Where she obtained the purchase price of eighty thousand ducats is unknown; possibly it was given to her out of the pontifical treasury, which if true made the transaction not a sale at all but a swindle. The whole affair is in any case another example of the extent to which restoring the power of the papacy and advancing the fortunes of his family had come to be intertwined not only in the pope’s thinking but in his actions. The tangle was probably inherent in the situation. A conquest of the Papal States in the pope’s name
would
be an assertion of the authority of Rome, no less if done by Cesare than by anyone else. And, it being necessary to entrust the management of the Papal States to
some
vicar, who
better
than Cesare?

Almost simultaneously with Alexander’s move against the Gaetani, Cesare embarked upon his new career as a soldier, bidding farewell to Louis XII and riding out of Milan at the head of a force of eighteen hundred cavalry and four thousand infantry brightly caparisoned in the red and yellow colors of the Borgias. Most of this force was made up of Swiss and Gascon mercenaries on loan from the king, all of them under the direct command of the Frenchman Yves d’Alègre. It was Alexander’s reward for his support of the Milan campaign, and it was Cesare’s to use—more or less—in whatever way he wished. Thus he found himself with the means to invade the Romagna and begin expelling the rulers of its numerous, mostly small city-states. Strategically the Romagna was a sensible choice: in the shadow of Milan and therefore within easy reach of the French king’s protection, far enough from Naples not to heighten the alarm that had been felt there when Alexander attacked the Gaetani.

Alexander had laid the groundwork for Cesare’s offensive, his
impresa
, back in July, with his bull excommunicating the Romagna’s leading lords. Nothing remained now but to enforce the bull and to do so in a way that was acceptable to the French and did not trigger a countermove by Venice, the only other state both close enough to the
Romagna to have a real stake in its future and strong enough to make trouble. These considerations decided Cesare’s selection of his first targets: the little cities of Imola and Forlì on the Via Emilia, the ancient Roman road that runs with scarcely more than an occasional gentle curve from Bologna down to the Adriatic coast. Imola and Forlì were an obvious choice because they were ruled, in the name of her eldest son, by Caterina Sforza, whom the events of 1499 had left utterly isolated. Louis XII had no possible interest in protecting a woman who was not only a Sforza, a niece of Ludovico il Moro, but had helped her uncle to recruit troops in the Romagna as he tried to prepare for the French invasion. When asked to include Caterina in his new alliance with Florence, Louis ingenuously replied that he could not possibly intrude into the pope’s affairs in such a way. It was an empty excuse, but the king’s position was so strong that he had no need to make himself believable.

Nor would Venice grieve to see Caterina destroyed. A year earlier, when Venetian troops set out to cross the Romagna at the start of a campaign aimed at making Florence a satellite of Venice, Caterina had been alone in offering resistance. She did so with such ferocious determination that the invaders, hampered by their war with the Turks, were obliged to return home. Now, in 1500, she was not only Venice’s enemy in her own right but also the chosen enemy of Venice’s sole important friend, Rome. Because of the Turkish threat, the Venetians could hardly have considered trying to save Caterina even had they been inclined to do so, which they emphatically were not. They had earlier annoyed Alexander by warning him that they would brook no interference with their near neighbor Ercole d’Este, whose duchy of Ferrara could have been a rich prize and potentially an ideal base for Cesare. They could not have been less interested in offending him further by interfering with Cesare’s plans.

Even a friendless
virago
was a dangerous enemy, however. Since the last time we encountered her—in 1488, the year she outwitted and annihilated the murderers of her husband Girolamo Riario—Caterina had made herself as hated and feared as any warlord in Italy. She was violent, ruthless, and capable of almost insane cruelty. At age thirty-six she was still blond and beautiful, though not as slim as she had been in her youth, had been widowed three times, and was the mother of five
sons and a daughter by Riario, a sixth son by her second husband Giacomo Feo, and a seventh by her third husband, an obscure member of the Medici family. Feo like Riario had been murdered, again deservedly so, and this time in taking revenge Caterina had not only wiped out the killers but had had their wives and children—including small children—tortured and executed. Though she had added considerably to Pope Alexander’s troubles at the time of the first French invasion by allying herself with her cousins in Milan and thus with Charles VIII, this had not prevented the pontiff from later proposing a marriage of her eldest son and heir, Ottaviano Riario, to Lucrezia. Caterina had declined; such a union could have made it difficult for her to continue ruling Imola and Forlì in the ineffectual Ottaviano’s name.

Caterina’s great problem, as Cesare’s assault force approached, was that there was only one of her and she had two cities to defend. She barricaded herself inside the
rocca
at Forlì, leaving Imola under the command of a
condottiere
named Dionigi di Naldi. In Caterina’s absence Imola proved impossible to hold, its inhabitants having suffered far too much at the hands of Caterina and her husbands to be willing to sacrifice anything on her behalf. Di Naldi and his troops withdrew into Imola’s
rocca
, but when Cesare and d’Alègre arrived and put on a demonstration of what their artillery could do to brickwork battlements, the fight was over. Di Naldi not only opened the fortress’s gates but joined Cesare’s army. It was agreed, as part of the surrender terms, that d’Alègre’s mercenaries would not be allowed inside the town walls of Imola. This proved to be unenforceable, assuming that the French commander made any attempt to enforce it, and the consequences were horrific: pillaging and rapine of the kind that the soldiers of northern Europe regarded as their right but that few Italians then living had ever experienced.

At Forlì, in the beginning, things unfolded much as they had at Imola. The townsfolk, evidently unaware of what had happened to their neighbors, welcomed the invaders while Caterina watched from the ramparts of her fortress. This time, however, Cesare made certain that the French troops were kept away from the civilians. And this time, Caterina Sforza being in personal command of the defenses, there would be no surrender. Having sent her children off to the safety of Florence, Caterina settled in for a fight to the finish, showing her contempt
for the people who had been her subjects for the previous twenty years by bombarding their homes with stone cannonballs.
“Should I have to perish,” she is supposed to have said, “I want to perish like a man.” Any doubts about whether it was going to be a long, hard siege were laid to rest when Caterina, to spread the general misery, broke open Forlì’s irrigation dams. The Romagna landscape being little less flat than a billiard table, she thereby succeeded in flooding both the town and the countryside surrounding and caused Cesare’s siege machinery to bog down in mud. At about this same time, Caterina or someone associated with her attempted to assassinate the pope at long distance, with an early experiment in chemical warfare. A message was sent to him wrapped either in poison or (depending on which version of the story is preferred) in fabric worn by a victim of the plague. The experiment failed and no harm was done aside from a further heightening, if such a thing was possible, of the general hostility.