The Borgias (53 page)

On August 6 a contract was signed at the Vatican. Its terms, when they became known, raised eyebrows across Italy and sparked indignation in the streets and palaces of Rome. Lucrezia’s dowry, greater than the one paid by the House of Sforza to marry one of its daughters to a Holy Roman emperor, included a round one hundred thousand gold ducats; an additional fortune in jewels; a sharp and perpetual reduction in the annual tribute that the duchy of Ferrara owed the papacy as a vassal state; the towns of Cento and Pieve (both of them actually the property of the archdiocese of Bologna, whose prelate was not consulted); and a number of valuable ecclesiastical benefices. Duke Ercole’s patience and cunning, the discipline with which he had maintained an air of indifference as to whether a wedding took place or not, had paid rich dividends. It had driven the pope, urged on by Cesare and encouraged by Lucrezia, to increase what he was offering and increase it again until finally more was on the table than the proudest duke in Europe would have been able to refuse, especially now that the prospective bride had been examined and not found wanting.

The invasion of Naples, meanwhile, was turning out to have been a
costly affair for the Colonna and their junior partners the Savelli. Both clans, traditionally affiliated with the House of Aragon, had signed on to fight for Don Fadrique, and both had seen one after another of their estates and strongholds fall to Louis XII’s army as it plundered its way southward. When Fadrique departed for France, he left behind his generals Fabrizio and Prospero Colonna, who thus found themselves unemployed and vulnerable. Fearing the French, they moved south until they were in territory that now belonged to Spain. There they offered their services to Gonsalvo, Ferdinand and Isabella’s newly appointed viceroy, who promptly hired them. Their kinsmen up in the Papal States, meanwhile, were left to fend for themselves. Alexander reaped the benefits, sending units of the papal army to probe the Colonna defenses and seize whatever they could. By contrast the Orsini, having given good service both to Cesare in the Romagna and to Louis XII during the descent upon Naples, ascended to new heights of wealth, power, and prestige. A move against them was out of the question, especially as they continued to have France as an employer and patron.

On September 17, upon returning to Rome from a visit to the south during which he had personally seen to the garrisoning and structural reinforcement of newly captured strongholds, Alexander issued a pair of breathtakingly ambitious bulls. The Colonna and Savelli were declared enemies of the Holy See and excommunicated, and the properties of the Savelli were given to the
condottieri
Paolo and Giulio Orsini in unavoidable—if regrettable, from the perspective of the Borgias—recognition of their contributions to the recent campaigns and their growing importance. The lands and castles of the Colonna were combined with the estates that had been “sold” to Lucrezia after being taken from the Gaetani in 1500 and that she now relinquished, having no need, as a future duchess of Ferrara, for papal territory. The districts thus made available became the basis for a papal revival of two ancient dukedoms. Lucrezia’s son Rodrigo, not yet two, was made duke of Sermoneta. A mysterious little character who had been christened Giovanni Borgia but would be known ever after as the Infant of Rome became duke of Nepi. Perhaps three years old at the time of his elevation to the highest noble rank, recently legitimatized by papal decree, this child was variously rumored to be Alexander’s, or Lucrezia’s, or Alexander
and
Lucrezia’s, even Alexander and Lucrezia
and Cesare’s
. It
is not absolutely impossible that he was the illegitimate child that Lucrezia was rumored to have given birth to after the end of her marriage to Giovanni Sforza. His origins have never been uncovered, but the most reasonable guess is that he was a bastard of Cesare’s by a woman whose name is lost to history.

With the bestowal of grand titles and vast holdings on a pair of Borgia infants, one of them of distinctly dubious parentage, Alexander carried nepotism to an extreme that few of his predecessors had dared to approach. In doing so he made it at last impossible for anyone to believe, or to credibly argue, that his real purpose in conferring so much wealth and so many lofty positions on members of his family was to protect the interests of the Church. If that claim had always been questionable, now it was simply laughable. The situation that the pope had created was without precedent: almost the whole of the Papal States had been made the hereditary property of his relatives. It was not defensible, and inevitably it aroused widespread resentment.

Lucrezia’s wedding became the event of the year—of the century, at least as far as Italy was concerned. And again everything was at the expense of the Church. The preparations consumed the attention of the Borgias and everyone closely connected with them throughout midwinter 1501–1502. Alexander, who continued to enjoy robust good health as he entered his seventies—“nothing worries him, he seems to grow younger every day,” Venice’s ambassador reported in an almost complaining tone—continued no less than in his youth to revel in magnificent display. He knew that the people of Rome would judge him by the magnificence with which he marked this grand occasion, and so he poured out the contents of the papal treasury with almost mad abandon, spending even more freely on preparations for the wedding than he had in preparing for Cesare’s visit to France in 1498. Ercole d’Este, having won a jackpot of a wedding settlement, felt free to match the pope’s outlays ducat for ducat, so that the months preceding Lucrezia’s return to married life became an exercise in extravagance on a scale no Roman then living had ever witnessed. A single piece of jewelry that Ercole sent to his future daughter-in-law was said to have a value of seventy thousand ducats.

The party sent from Ferrara to claim the bride and escort her to her husband and new home arrived in Rome on December 23. It included
some fifteen hundred persons, many of them high nobles and churchmen and other notables, and was headed by the bridegroom’s three younger brothers, one of whom, the cleric Ippolito, had been appointed to the College of Cardinals in 1493 in spite of being only fourteen years old. On hand to receive it were all the nobles and officials of the city and nineteen cardinals, each accompanied by two hundred horsemen. Cesare’s personal entourage included scores of Roman nobles and four thousand mounted troops, all wearing his red and yellow livery, and the stallion he rode was adorned with jewels and precious metals. The welcoming ceremony went on through hours of orations, with the pope not participating but looking on contentedly from the upper reaches of the Vatican.

There followed, after a week during which the whole capital was given over to an unending round of games, tournaments, sporting events, theatrical performances, and other entertainments, a proxy wedding presided over by thirteen cardinals. Another carnival-like week passed before, on January 6, Lucrezia at last bade the pope farewell and rode out of Rome at the center of a retinue of hundreds of sundry dignitaries and a guard of six hundred uniformed horsemen. Her trousseau—trunk after trunk filled with gowns made of the costliest materials to be found in Italy, plus jewels and gold and silver and fine linen and works of art—was strapped to the backs of 150 mules.

Her departure was a true goodbye, a real change of life. Lucrezia and Alexander would never meet again. Nor would Lucrezia ever again see her little son Rodrigo, who in keeping with custom was not permitted to join his mother as she entered a new marriage. He remained behind, like the Infant of Rome now a permanent member of the papal household.

Lucrezia was on the road for just a day short of four weeks, making formal visits to all the places of note along the way. At every stop, local lords and ladies eager to curry favor spent more than they could afford on new rounds of entertainment and display. It was exhausting, and disagreeable in other ways as well; forced jollity and manufactured displays of affection were required of everyone involved, and of Lucrezia most particularly, everywhere she went. One of the stops had deeply unpleasant associations: Pesaro, where Lucrezia had once spent tedious months as the wife of Giovanni Sforza. Bologna too must have been
excruciating; there the bride was received by Ginevra Bentivoglio, who in addition to being wife of the city’s lord was Giovanni Sforza’s aunt and the grandmother of Astorre Manfredi, now a prisoner in Rome.

Arrival in Ferrara brought Lucrezia’s first exposure to Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, who had been placed in charge of hospitality by her father Duke Ercole. Lucrezia of course knew that Isabella had opposed the marriage from the beginning and that she remained deeply suspicious of her and doubtful of her moral character. Making things still worse was Isabella’s status as a proud and famous beauty, accustomed to being the center of attention at her father’s court and her husband’s at Mantua and Modena. She saw Lucrezia as a rival, a threat to her preeminence. The effusions of false joy and devotion at this first encounter must have been wonderful to behold.

At last Lucrezia came face-to-face with her husband, the stolid Alfonso, who is not likely to have troubled himself to bring whatever charm he was capable of mustering to bear upon his new mate. She, in consequence, is not likely to have been overly delighted by what she first saw of him. The marriage was consummated with dispatch all the same, and the festivities went on and on until Duke Ercole was hinting sourly and in increasingly loud tones that perhaps it was time for people to be returning to their own homes. Gradually Ferrara returned to normal. It remained for the truth about Lucrezia’s character to be revealed by the test that now lay before her: the need to go on with life under the cold gaze of a hardheaded father-in-law, a distinctly uninfatuated husband, a hostile sister-in-law, and platoons of other in-laws and courtiers all looking for reasons to find fault.

An uneasy quiet prevailed across Italy through the first four months of Lucrezia’s new life. There was no war anywhere, aside from the minor clashes that broke out from time to time as Florence continued its harassment of Pisa. Signs of impending trouble, however, were not hard to find. Predictably, the division of Naples between France and Spain had proved satisfactory to neither party, leading almost immediately to skirmishes along the frontier separating the kingdom’s two halves and making a showdown seem not only inevitable but likely to occur soon. In Rome, Cesare was preparing to set forth on a third
impresa
. His prospects could hardly have been more favorable. He could depend upon France and Spain to be tolerant if not actively supportive;
neither would want to alienate him or the pope with a new war for Naples looming. Florence could put no obstacles in his path; what remained of its strength was being drained away by the struggle to retake Pisa. Venice too was otherwise engaged (with the Turks, as usual), Ferrara was now more or less an ally thanks to Lucrezia’s marriage, and the Romagna was his to command. The Colonna had been weakened to the point of irrelevance, and though the Orsini remained strong, Cesare had co-opted them by signing their leading men to
condotta
.

Cesare, who with one more successful campaign could make himself supreme in north-central Italy, was almost ready to move. By letting no one know what he intended to do, where he was going to take his army once it was on the march, he spread anxiety from the canals of Venice to the hills of Tuscany. He already had troops stationed at far-flung strategic points. Some were at Cesena, in the hills bordering the far eastern edge of the Lombard Plain, under the toughest of his Spanish lieutenants, Ramiro de Lorqua. Michelotto Corella, almost certainly guilty of strangling the duke of Bisceglie on Cesare’s behalf, was in the Romagna recruiting and training a militia. Other troops waited on the Romagna-Tuscany frontier under Vitellozzo Vitelli and his equally thuggish crony Gian Paolo Baglioni of Perugia. If any of them knew what Cesare was planning, they too were keeping silent.

The fates, however, proved as capricious as ever and plucked the initiative out of Cesare’s hands. On June 4 the Tuscan city of Arezzo, fed up with the taxes imposed by Florence to finance its war on Pisa, suddenly rebelled. It expelled its Florentine governors and called for a restoration of the Medici. Cesare’s man Vitelli, presumably acting without his knowledge, immediately moved in, and he and his 3,500 soldiers were welcomed as liberators by the Arezzans. Vitelli and Baglioni also took possession of the fertile Chiana valley, west of Arezzo and even closer to Florence. All this was a mortal challenge to the Florentines, a flagrant occupation of their home territory. It was made all the more threatening by the appearance, with Vitelli and Baglioni, of the hapless Piero de’ Medici, perpetually in search of an opportunity to become master of Florence once again. These developments immediately brought to the fore the question of where the real power now resided in central Italy. In doing so they left the king of France with no choice but to become involved.

Vitelli, so consumed by hatred of the Florentines as to be nearly incapable of behaving responsibly, was the worst possible man to be in the middle of this situation.
One historian has suggested that, being no friend of the Borgias in spite of being in Cesare’s pay, he had encouraged the Arezzans to rebel, hoping to put the blame on Cesare and thereby turn the French against him. An alternative hypothesis is that Cesare, upon learning of the rebellion, ordered Vitelli to occupy Arezzo in order to gauge just how determined the French king was to protect Florence. It quickly became clear that he was very determined indeed: he sent unequivocal orders for Vitelli and Baglioni to pull out of Arezzo immediately. When the two of them ignored this edict, Cesare as their employer was put in a severely awkward position. He decided not to be deflected, however, from the execution of his own plans.

The Arezzo crisis accelerated everything. Just two days after the start of the rebellion two corpses, their hands and feet bound, were found in the Tiber River. One was the body of Astorre Manfredi, late lord of Faenza, the other of the illegitimate half-brother who had been his comrade in arms through the long winter when Cesare had them and their city under siege. Both youths, following their negotiated surrender, had become members of Cesare’s entourage, then prisoners in the Castel Sant’Angelo. And now they were dead. No one but Cesare could have been responsible. His motive is not hard to guess: to remove a popular young leader in support of whom the people of Faenza might themselves have rebelled. Four days after the discovery of the bodies, having cleared the decks, Cesare was on the move. He led his army out of Rome and headed north and east. As before, no one appeared to have any idea of where he was going or what he intended to do.