The Borgias (51 page)

Against all odds, this turned out to be a brilliant choice, one that would not only make those first settlers safe but bring their descendants fabulous wealth and power. The first Venetians, in sole possession of the secret of how to thread through the shallows of the lagoon and reach their islands, found themselves to be untouchable as new waves of invaders—Ostrogoths, Lombards—took their turns at pillaging Italy. The islanders supported themselves first with fishing, then with trade on a petty scale. They increased their security by putting themselves under
the protection of nearby Ravenna, then the principal Italian outpost of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Venice remained obscure for centuries, but its improbable location kept it free of the most destructive conflicts of the time. Meanwhile its seafaring traders were growing in experience, expanding their markets and becoming rich. They avoided entanglement with either Constantinople or the new western empire of Charlemagne, who gave up on capturing Venice after two failed attempts. Later they were able to stay clear of the long, debilitating fight between the popes and German emperors. By early in the eleventh century Venice was emerging as what it would remain for centuries, the hub of a commercial network the spokes of which reached not only into the Greek Christian Empire but into the lands of the Slavs, Turks, and Arabs. Its galleys became the means by which the peoples of the Mediterranean traded such staples as grain, wine, salt, wool, and cloth. By venturing to Egypt, Syria, and the ports of the Black Sea, they procured for Europe the exotic (and stunningly profitable) produce of India, China, and Southeast Asia. The soldiers they carried made Venice mistress of the east coast of the Adriatic, less out of any hunger for conquest than because territory so close to the city’s shipping lanes could not be allowed to fall into unfriendly hands.

Constantinople, simultaneously a trading partner and a rival, was crucial to Venice’s development. In the 1080s, as a reward for using its fleet to save the Eastern emperor from an invasion by the Normans of Sicily, Venice was granted an exemption from Constantinople’s excise tax. This gave it a much-resented advantage over its competitors Pisa and Genoa. At the start of the thirteenth century, by providing the transportation that made it possible for the knights of the Fourth Crusade to fall upon Constantinople and sack it without mercy, Venice helped weaken the Eastern emperors so gravely that they never entirely recovered. This would prove, eventually, to have been a terrible mistake, removing the prime obstacle to expansion by far more dangerous rivals. The worst of its consequences, however, would not become clear until the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453. In the interim the Venetians were masters of world trade, using their immense profits to raise up a city as beautiful as anything ever created by the hand of man. As for the price ultimately paid for the ruin of Constantinople, perhaps it is unfair to blame merchants for failing to see two and half centuries into the future.

From the beginning, the Venetians had embraced collective—republican—government, giving authority more often to committees and boards than to individuals. The leader or doge came to be elected, generally for life and by a process almost indescribably complex, and his freedom of action was so limited—he could not engage in trade, accept gifts, own property outside Venice, or even leave the city without permission—that the kind of autocracy that became the rule elsewhere in Italy remained impossible. Dynastic ambitions were cut off at their roots by rules prohibiting the sons of doges from holding office or even voting.

In the century following the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople, Venice’s government narrowed and hardened into an oligarchy. The city’s Great Council came to be restricted to elite families, and only council members could become magistrates or hold other important offices. Executive power passed from the doge, now little more than a ceremonial figurehead, to a central committee known as the Ten, or the Signoria. What resulted has often been depicted as oppressive and stultifying. If it was those things, it was also efficient, effective, and acceptable to the population, strikingly so in comparison with what was happening elsewhere.

The Venetians were a uniquely homogenous people, virtually everyone being either in business or dependent on business, and therefore their city was remarkably cohesive. Its hundred thousand residents remained placid across the generations, thanks to the general prosperity, the availability of “institutions of public utility” such as hospitals, and the absence of the kind of feudal nobility that in other places clashed with and tried to dominate the commercial classes. Even the satellite cities of Venice’s growing empire were dealt with generously and gave every evidence of being satisfied; this contrasts sharply with the experience of Florence, which was harsh in its treatment of the cities that came under its rule and was hated and occasionally rebelled against as a result. Not for nothing did Venice style itself La Serenissima—the Most Serene Republic. It saw itself as superior to other states, and in significant ways it was.

Neutrality came naturally to the Venetians; it was the sensible policy for a state whose prosperity depended on doing business with the whole world. It became progressively less feasible, however, as the fifteenth
century advanced. First the aggression of the Visconti of Milan so alarmed the Venetians that they felt compelled to enter into an alliance with Florence, thereby being drawn into mainland politics as never before. Then the advance of the Ottoman Turks became a threat to the very survival of Venice’s overseas empire. The year 1463 brought a war with the Turks that would drag on for sixteen years and end on terms so unfavorable as to amount to an acknowledgment that the city was no longer capable of checking Ottoman expansion. The Most Serene Republic was serene no more. Thinking now that the only way of maintaining its security was to expand on the mainland, it launched the attack on the Este of Ferrara that turned into two more years of vicious warfare and produced no gains commensurate with the costs. The years following brought scattered successes, the annexation of Cyprus being the most noteworthy, but these were not sufficient to allay the Venetians’ pervasive sense that everything their forebears had built was in mortal peril. In the Europe beyond Italy, the unification of Spain and the resurgence of France were giving rise to two more powers that Venice could never hope to compete with. The world was beginning to pass it by.

This was the situation when Rodrigo Borgia became pope in 1492. It explains the Venetians’ quiet encouragement of Charles VIII’s invasion: they hoped he would help them expand into the Romagna. It also explains why, after joining the league that forced Charles to beat a retreat back to France, the Venetians struck out on their own once again, trying now to subdue Florence but finding themselves foiled by the stubborn resistance of Caterina Sforza in the Romagna and the outbreak of fresh fighting with the Turks. And why they next welcomed Louis XII into Italy, hoping that he could be maneuvered into pulling them out of their predicament.

17

Conqueror

The winter of 1500–1501, like most winters before the industrial revolution brought mechanized all-weather warfare, was a peaceful interval between the close of one fighting season and the opening of another. Lucrezia Borgia, now a twenty-year-old dowager duchess with a baby son, passed the cold months sequestered in the papal stronghold of Nepi, adapting to life without her husband. Her brother Cesare and their patron the pope remained in Rome, where they occupied themselves with, among other matters of state, deciding where to marry her next. Barely five months after the duke of Bisceglie’s murder, Pope Alexander had announced Lucrezia’s betrothal to the young Francesco Orsini, duke of Gravina. That plan had come to nothing, perhaps because such a union could not be reconciled with Alexander’s determination to break the Orsini, perhaps because it became obvious that Lucrezia could be used to bag bigger game.

As in the period after the annulment of Lucrezia’s first marriage, there was no shortage of suitors. By January 1501, however, Alexander and Cesare were focusing their aspirations on a prospect who not only had no wish to make Lucrezia his wife but was grimly hostile to the idea. This was Alfonso d’Este, who as eldest son of Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara was a scion of one of the oldest noble families in Europe and heir to a city-state that, if not as brilliant as Florence or as mighty as Venice, did not fall far short of ranking among Italy’s leading powers.
The Este married in only the loftiest of circles: Alfonso was a grandson of Ferrante of Naples, his sisters had wed Ludovico il Moro of Milan and Francesco Gonzaga, marquess of Mantua, and his own short-lived first wife had been a daughter and sister of Sforza dukes. It was no less desirable for Lucrezia to become one of them than it had been to connect Cesare to the French royal family.

More than prestige was at stake. Because Ferrara lay just north of the Romagna, it could serve as a valuable ally, a northern shield, for the state that Cesare was assembling for himself there. Conversely, it had the potential to become a threat to the achievement of Cesare’s plans. A basis for friendship between the two families existed in the person of Louis XII: the Este had traditionally found it advantageous to be attentive to the wishes of the French crown, and in 1501 that history put them, ipso facto, on friendly terms with the Borgias as well. On the other hand the Este had lately been on bloodily bad terms with their mighty neighbors the Venetians. Fear of Venice kept them chronically in search of allies.

Negotiation of a possible marriage began that January. Longtime Borgia retainer Ramiro de Lorqua, the grimly tough veteran of the wars of Spanish unification whom Cesare had left in charge of Imola and Forlì, served as go-between. In the early going the Borgias did all the proposing, the Este merely listening with an air of detachment, and there seemed little likelihood of success. The fact that the Borgias had produced two popes in forty years was not nearly sufficient to impress the proud House of Este, which had a history as rich in betrayal and murder as any warlord family in Italy but was of such antiquity that its roots disappeared among the higher nobility of Germany in the murky depths of the Dark Ages. Like all leading families, the Este took pains to keep themselves informed of events at the papal court, and through their agents they had heard enough stories to make some of them think it inconceivable that Lucrezia could possibly be a suitable bride for the duke’s heir. Duke Ercole’s daughter Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, marquessa of Mantua and one of the most cultivated women that Renaissance Italy would produce, became almost shrill in her opposition. She was echoed by her husband’s sister, the wife of Duke Guidobaldo da Montefeltro of Urbino, who though not an Este herself was offended by the thought of even an indirect connection with the parvenu Spaniards. The prospective
bridegroom Alfonso, not unintelligent but coarse-natured, interested less in arts and letters and the niceties of court life than in the smoky foundry where he spent his days conducting experiments in the manufacture of artillery, was characteristically blunt in declaring that no such marriage was going to take place. Faced with all this, and with Duke Ercole’s refusal to be impressed with the pope’s explanations of why an alliance with Rome would be good for Ferrara and a refusal of the marriage would be bad, Alexander and Cesare turned to Louis of France for help.

Meanwhile there was much else to be done. With the arrival of spring Cesare was able to bring his troops out of winter quarters and increase the pressure on Faenza, which he had kept under siege for half a year now. Toward the end of April the city’s stout-hearted young lord, Astorre Manfredi, yielded to the inevitable and agreed to hand his city over on condition that it would not be plundered and its population not mistreated. Cesare was scrupulous in honoring his pledge; he was making it his practice to deal generously with people and places whose lord he intended to remain, thereby winning the loyalty of cities accustomed to the random cruelties of sadists. When he moved on from Faenza, Astorre went with him, whether as a prisoner or a volunteer addition to the papal army is not clear.

In the first great bluff of his military career, Cesare moved his troops toward Bologna. Though an attack on the city was politically impossible, Louis XII having taken it under his protection, this was not something on which Bolognese strongman Giovanni Bentivoglio could bet his future. He had no way of being confident either that the French king would honor his promises or that his young adversary would be deterred by those promises. Therefore he was frightened and scrambled to prepare his defenses while sending appeals to Louis for help. In fact Cesare appreciated the risks of flouting the French king’s instructions and was far too canny to incur those risks. His target was not Bologna but its satellite town of Castel Bolognese, the last strongpoint on the Via Emilia between Imola and Rimini not yet in his possession

As it happened, Louis had disliked Bentivoglio at least since the latter had been one of the few warlords to support Ludovico il Moro’s futile attempt to fend off the invasion of Milan. He could, however, see no advantage in allowing Cesare to add a prize as important as Bologna to
his fast-growing list of conquests. He split the difference, forbidding Cesare to attack Bologna but ordering Bentivoglio to give up Castel Bolognese. In the settlement worked out by Cesare’s representatives and an angry Bentivoglio, Bologna not only ceded Castel Bolognese but pledged to provide the papal army with hundreds of troops for the next three years and to cooperate with its future incursions into the Romagna. Back in Rome, Alexander celebrated this success by bestowing on Cesare the title duke of Romagna—
Duca Valentino di Romagna
. With Imola, Castel Bolognese, Faenza, Forlì, Cesena, Rimini, and Pesaro all now firmly in his hands, Duke Valentino was master of more of the Romagna than anyone had been in centuries and was the region’s duke. Louis XII thought he should be satisfied.