The Borgias (54 page)

Word spread that his objective was Camerino, a city-state of some thirty thousand inhabitants ninety miles north of Rome. It was in a sense an improbable target. Being well to the south of Cesare’s Romagna conquests, it could never be easily integrated into the state he was assembling. But it was also a rich little city ruled by a particularly unpopular tyrant. The seventy-year-old Giulio Cesare Varano, who as a young man had seized power by murdering his brother (fratricide having been an almost regular occurrence among the Varani from early in the thirteenth century), had been declared an outlaw for failing to pay the annual tribute owed to the Vatican. He was also,
along with his four arrogant sons, hated by his subjects. If brought under attack, the Varani would inspire none of the loyalty that had made it so difficult to take Faenza from the Manfredi.

All such speculation turned out to be irrelevant when, in a lightning stroke that stunned the whole of northern Italy, Cesare abruptly changed direction and, moving his army through sixty miles of rugged mountain country in an astonishing forty-eight hours, fell not upon Camerino but upon the far greater prize of Urbino fifty miles to its north. Urbino was then what it remains today: one of the jewels of northwestern Italy. A beautiful little city on a high hill, it was towered over by the magnificent palace made possible by the colossal earnings of the duke who built it, Federico da Montefeltro, second only to Francesco Sforza of Milan among the great
condottieri
of the fifteenth century. His son and successor, the same Guidobaldo da Montefeltro who had been Juan Borgia’s co-commander in the failed attack on the Orsini with which Alexander VI opened his reign, was urged by the townsfolk to organize a defense as soon as they understood that Cesare’s army was coming down on them.

The refined Guidobaldo, more scholar than soldier, saw no point in doing anything of the kind. He sensibly concluded that the likely result of resistance would be the destruction of everything his father had built and catastrophe for Urbino’s people. He therefore departed with his wife Elisabetta, who as a Gonzaga of Mantua was now related by marriage to Lucrezia Borgia and therefore to Cesare himself. (In an all-too-typical example of the arcane ways in which all the leading families of Italy had come to be interconnected, Lucrezia’s third marriage had made Cesare the brother of the bride of Elisabetta’s brother Francesco Gonzaga’s wife’s brother Alfonso d’Este. Diagrams are required to make such things understandable.)

When Cesare reached Urbino on June 21, he met with no resistance and was able to take possession of the city without a blow being struck or a drop of blood shed. He found the ducal palace filled with treasures of every description, everything the Montefeltri family had accumulated over the generations, the magnificent library that Duke Federico had devoted much of his life to assembling included. He ordered all of it packed up for transfer to Cesena, now a base of Borgia operations in the north and under the command of the fierce and faithful Lorqua.

The conquest of Urbino was, depending on one’s point of view, either a stroke of tactical brilliance or the cynical betrayal of a blameless duke. Possibly it was both, but it is less than certain that Guidobaldo was entirely innocent. Cesare, who rarely troubled to explain himself, chose to do so in this case, claiming that he had decided to move against Urbino only after learning that Guidobaldo was secretly sending assistance to the outlawed Giulio Cesare Varano in Camerino. This is not necessarily untrue. It would have been prudent of Guidobaldo to surmise that if Camerino were allowed to fall into Cesare’s hands, Urbino would become a convenient and logical next target. Nor would he have been wrong in supposing that, by helping Varano and his sons to hold off Cesare at Camerino, he might save Urbino from attack. What mattered, however, was Cesare’s capture of an extraordinary prize at almost no cost. This enhanced his stature as the most dangerous man in Italy after Louis XII.

Two questions were on every mind. What was Cesare going to do next, and what was his ultimate objective? When he sent word to Florence that he had important matters to discuss, the city’s
signoria
hastened to respond. They assigned one of the republic’s leading diplomats, Bishop Francesco Soderini, to hurry to Urbino. There he was to do everything possible to keep Cesare out of Tuscany and get Vitelli and Baglioni out of Arezzo and the Val di Chiana.

Soderini was a capable man, experienced, sophisticated, and clever. He was also a member of one of Florence’s most distinguished families; in this same year, his brother Piero would be appointed to the new and immensely prestigious position of gonfalonier for life. It was unthinkable to send such a high dignitary on such a sensitive mission without a private secretary, and a worthy one at that. So when the bishop rode out of Florence en route to Urbino, at his side was a rising young diplomat and civil servant named Niccolò Machiavelli.

Background
 
 THE ANGEL’S CASTLE

ONE THING AT LEAST REMAINED CONSTANT THROUGH ALL THE transformations the city of Rome underwent during the thousand years preceding the arrival of the Borgias. The massive bulk of the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Castle of the Holy Angel, continued to loom over the Tiber River where it passes closest to the Vatican. The Castel was already hundreds of years old when the Roman Empire fell. It was approaching its seven-hundredth birthday when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman emperor, and it would be midway through its second millennium when work began on the great basilica that dominates St. Peter’s Square today.

The Borgias, once they were on the scene, soon learned what everyone learned who was involved in the politics of Rome: that the Castel was the city’s sole impregnable fortress, the place that no ruler seeking to be safe could afford to be without.

There is irony in this. When built, the Castel was not intended for any military purpose—or even for the use of living human beings. It was a mausoleum, a crypt, the creation of the Emperor Hadrian, the second-century Spaniard who also built the famous wall across the north of Britain. When he came to the throne in 117 AD, Rome already had a grand mausoleum for the ashes of deceased emperors and their families, a massive affair built by Augustus in 28 BC. But its last available niche had been filled with the remains of the Emperor Nerva in 98 AD. Nerva’s successor and Hadrian’s immediate predecessor, Trajan, finessed the problem by arranging to have himself interred beneath the immense column that bears his name and has been one of Rome’s landmarks ever since. Hadrian, however, found this an unsatisfactory expedient. In the early 130s he ordered work begun on a structure so ambitious that it would not be completed in his lifetime. His contemporaries, finding nothing to compare it with even in the imperial capital, described it in terms that evoked the gigantic monuments of ancient Egypt.

Hadrian’s Tomb, as it was called almost from the start, was an enormous
squat cylinder resting on an even bigger boxlike base of four equal sides, all of it sheathed in fine Parian marble and faced with Ionic and Corinthian colonnades. The outer wall of the upper cylinder provided the base for a ring of statues that encircled a garden-in-the-sky, and at the elevated center of this garden, towering over the entire neighborhood, was a kind of cupola sheltering an almost preposterously outsize statue of Hadrian, the head of which can be seen today in one of Rome’s museums. The burial chamber was at the center of the basement level. Persons granted admission to the interior could ascend to the garden through a spiral passageway that was eleven feet wide with a thirty-foot ceiling.

Hadrian, one of the empire’s more capable rulers, was not the first person to be buried in his tomb. He was preceded in death by his adopted son and intended successor, just as two centuries before Augustus had lost a stepson and two grandsons before expiring himself. Hadrian was joined in due course by generations of later emperors, including such famous figures as Marcus Aurelius, his son Commodus, and Septimus Severus. The last burial was that of the Emperor Caracalla, assassinated in 217, after which the structure was incorporated into a new city wall and stood dormant until, two centuries later, Rome came under threat from Germanic invaders. At that point the city’s desperate defenders awoke to the fact that Hadrian’s Tomb was by far the most formidable stronghold available to them. Its conversion to military use probably occurred early in the fifth century, during the dismal years when the Emperor Honorius presided over the accelerating disintegration of the empire. Though it gradually lost much of its original grandeur—in 537 Hadrian’s magnificent statues were hurled down on attacking Ostrogoths—unlike the Tomb of Augustus it was never reduced to a heap of crumbling ruins.

The year 530 was memorable for a terrible Tiber flood, a consequent outbreak of plague, and a resulting change of name for the tomb. This happened because Pope Gregory the Great, in leading a procession of penitents across the bridge that Hadrian had constructed adjacent to his mausoleum, happened to look up and saw the majestic figure of Saint Michael the Archangel returning to its sheath a bloody sword. This was a sign, as Gregory explained to the faithful, that the epidemic was at an end. It did abate in any case, and Hadrian’s Tomb became the Castel Sant’Angelo.

Visitors from the spirit world notwithstanding, the Castel became the setting for nightmarish dramas. The imprisonment, torture, and murder of successive popes that punctuated the so-called pornocracy of the tenth century all took place in the Castel, which subsequently was fought over by the baronial clans and by popes and antipopes. The Colonna had possession for a time, but lost it in a nasty little war that ended with their banishment from Rome. A century and a half later, in order to save it from demolition, the pope of the time had to cede it to the Orsini. It was an Orsini pope, Nicholas III, who in 1277 built a fortified passageway to the Castel as a means of escape from the Vatican. By the early fifteenth century the Castel was permanently in the custody of the Church, and a stout and ugly square tower had been installed atop the cylinder, high up where Hadrian’s garden had once been. The marble facade had been stripped away for use in paving the streets.

The Castel had become the key to Rome, or at least to avoiding expulsion. Like the Tower of London in distant England it served a multitude of purposes: stronghold, part-time residence for rulers, prison, symbol of power, refuge in time of danger. Alexander invested heavily in strengthening it and in making it a comfortable retreat.

He also fortified the Passetto di Borgo, the passageway connecting the Vatican to the Castel. It would be the saving of a number of his relatives, at least for a while.

18

“Longing for Greatness and Renown”

“Splendid.”

“Magnificent.”

These are the first two adjectives employed by Niccolò Machiavelli in the description of Cesare Borgia that he writes as the two are getting to know each other in Urbino in the hair-raising summer of 1502.

This lord is truly splendid and magnificent
, he reports to his masters in Florence.
In the pursuit of glory and territory he is unceasing and knows neither danger nor fatigue
.

Such words are remarkable, coming as they do from Machiavelli of all people. Few men in history have been less easy to impress. He will be famous forever for the wryness of his observations, the cool detachment with which he arrives at his sometimes stunning insights, and above all the fathomless cynicism that pervades his classic work
The Prince
. His writings drip with contempt for some of the greatest figures of his day. To see him lavishing praise on someone he has just met, an adversary five years his junior, is not only unexpected but little short of astonishing.

Despite all the reasons he has to despise Cesare and depict him in the ugliest possible terms—he is, after all, a mortal danger to the Republic of Florence—Machiavelli’s description reads like a hymn of praise, a rapture, almost a love song.
Cesare is
loved by his soldiers
, he writes. Cesare is
victorious and formidable
, and enjoys
constant good fortune
. As the
words pile up, one begins to wonder if Machiavelli has lost the ability to think critically, if he is in the grip of something akin to infatuation. Once again, as with Cesare’s domination of Pope Alexander, we catch a reflection of the power, the raw charisma, of his personality.
Of the almost preternaturally magnetic force felt by almost everyone who ever came near him, and of the physical appeal that came with being what he was repeatedly called: “the handsomest man of his time.”
The historian Pandolfo Collenuccio wrote of the grown-up Cesare in 1500 that he was “accounted valiant, joyous, and open-handed, and it is believed that he holds honest men in high esteem.”
In a flash of almost Machiavellian insight, Collenuccio further described Cesare as “filled with aspiration” and having “a longing for greatness and renown.”