The Borgias (55 page)

Machiavelli himself looked deeper and saw more. He decided that Cesare, more than anyone else then living, had the vision, the boldness, and the strength of character needed to rescue Italy from the divisions that had made it so vulnerable to invaders.

In company with Francesco Soderini, Machiavelli had arrived in Urbino around sundown on June 24 at the end of a hard ride over the Apennines. The two were given accommodations in the city’s episcopal palace, Soderini being a bishop, and shortly before midnight were taken to see Cesare. Rarely are historians given a greater gift than this: that as acute an observer as has ever lived should visit and report upon one of the most strikingly memorable figures of the Renaissance. And that they should continue to meet as Cesare’s story unfolds, the result being a kind of three-dimensional portrait extended, and evolving, over time.

It is irresistibly fascinating, the image of these two young men, each destined in his own way and on his own schedule for failure and eternal fame, facing each other for the first time. They have been brought together not just by great events but by need. Cesare needing Florence—needing something
from
Florence, certainly, in spite of the city’s weakness and the conquests that have made him so feared. Machiavelli and the bishop, in their turn, needing something from Cesare—needing above all to find some way of keeping him as far from Florence as possible. Reduced to a single word, that is their mission: to keep Cesare
away
.

They meet in one of the numerous vast and high-ceilinged chambers
of Urbino’s glorious ducal palace, still unfinished in 1502 but already comprising more than 250 rooms. On one side, alone behind an expanse of polished tabletop, sits Cesare, master of the situation no less than of the sleeping city of Urbino. Cesare the crafty, the self-dramatizing, playing his little trick of meeting with callers in the middle of the night, a single burning candle placed behind him so that he can see the faces of his visitors while his own remains in shadow. Dressed as always in a simple black tunic that sets off his ivory skin and is adorned with nothing except the emblem of the Order of St. Michel that the king of France first placed around his neck. Cesare the conqueror. Valentino.

Opposite, alongside the bishop he serves, sits Machiavelli the mere secretary, the civil servant, the promising junior diplomat. He is nobody’s idea of handsome, with his close-set eyes in a long ovoid face that narrows down to a sharp chin. If there is not much strength in that face, there is mischief in the eyes, the trace of a smile flickering about the thin lips. Cesare will learn to enjoy Machiavelli’s company, and it is not hard to see why. In addition to their shared fascination with power—Cesare the practitioner, Machiavelli one of the most original students the subject has ever had—they have in common a lively wit and a kind of intelligence that can be hard and cold as ice. If Machiavelli is perhaps not capable of rising to Cesare’s level of ruthlessness—life will give him no opportunity to find out—he is certainly capable of appreciating Cesare’s attainments in that regard. They have been brought together by matters vital to both of them, under circumstances that make it impossible for either to be entirely forthright. Each has to look for hidden meanings in whatever the other says. Something clicks between them all the same. They are more than shrewd enough, both of them, to take each other’s measure quickly, and to see how well they are matched.

At this first meeting, which continues into the small hours of a new day, Cesare and his visitors spar cordially, engaging in oblique attempted bluffs. Cesare complains, accurately enough, that Florence has failed to carry out the terms of the previous year’s agreement, which was, boiled down to its implicit essence, a promise to pay him not to attack. Soderini counters by suggesting, not implausibly though the truth of the matter cannot be known to him and remains unknown to the present day, that Cesare colluded in the seizure of Arezzo and the
Val de Chiana by Vitellozzo Vitelli and Gian Paolo Baglioni. The two try to trump each other in laying claim to the support of Louis XII, whom they know to be quite powerful enough to obliterate not only Florence and the Borgias but their enemies and friends as well.

The king of France, as it happens, is a subject of which Cesare and Machiavelli share exceptional personal knowledge. Both have spent long anxious months at Louis XII’s court. Both went there—at separate times—in search of favors. And both, after much frustration, were ultimately successful: Cesare in obtaining a dukedom, a bride, and adoption as one of the king’s favorites, Machiavelli in winning a promise of protection for Florence. What Cesare now hints—that Louis will raise no objection if he simply seizes Florence and installs there a government that can be depended upon to do his bidding—would have seemed plausible to many listeners. It may even have frightened Soderini. Machiavelli, however, knows better and is less impressed than amused. He knows that Louis, in addition to being in real need of Borgia support, is also seriously short of money, is going to need Florence’s banks, and can have no interest in allowing Cesare to take control of the Florentine territories through which French troops will soon have to pass on their way to Naples.

Still, not even Machiavelli can find anything amusing about the note on which Cesare ends the meeting. He is not, he declares, going to put up with procrastination or prevarication. Florence has to decide: it is his friend or his enemy, and there is no middle ground. If it chooses to be his friend, it has nothing to fear; it possesses nothing that he wants. If the
signoria
is worried about a possible restoration of the Medici, nothing could be more obvious than that Cesare is in the business of removing, not installing, tyrants. If on the other hand Florence rejects his friendship, he will have no choice but to respond as he thinks best. Thus does the threat of invasion hang in the night air as Cesare dismisses his visitors, advising them to stand by for further talk on the morrow.

The next morning, finding themselves unsummoned, Soderini and Machiavelli left their quarters and went exploring, no doubt doing their best to imitate casual sightseers while in fact on the hunt for information. Even as sons of Florence, that city of splendor, they must have been impressed by what the Montefeltri family had done with the
mountaintop redoubt of Urbino. At a time when a common laborer could expect to earn perhaps fifteen ducats in a year, when 2,500 ducats was sufficient to set up an aristocratic family in a respectable home, Federico da Montefeltro had spent two hundred thousand on the expansion and perfection of his ancestral base. He had spent scores more thousands on acquiring exquisite works of art and on assembling a collection of manuscripts said to surpass the library of Oxford University. And now palace and library alike were being stripped bare, paintings and statues and all the rest being loaded onto carts to be hauled a hundred miles north to Cesare’s
rocca
at Cesena.

At some point in their tour, presumably to their surprise and undoubtedly to their delight, the two Florentines came upon, or found themselves intercepted by, Paolo Orsini and his cousin Giulio. This pair, well known as soldiers and leading members of their clan, had come to Urbino with Cesare’s army as two of his
condottieri
. Their encounter with Soderini and Machiavelli may have been awkward, at least at first. Like almost all members of their family, Paolo and Giulio were Medici partisans and enemies of Florence’s current regime. But that morning in Urbino, Soderini and Machiavelli had far less interest in ancient blood feuds than in trying to learn whatever they could, especially about what Cesare was thinking and what he intended to do. And so they gave themselves over to a friendly chat. The Orsini did likewise, and the talk turned inexorably to what had been discussed in Cesare’s chamber the night before: the question of how Louis of France was likely to react if Cesare moved against Florence. The Orsini spoke carefully, obliquely. Acknowledging that the king was unlikely ever to explicitly withdraw his promise to protect Florence—by doing so he would make himself look dishonorable and weak—they nevertheless gave the visitors to understand that Louis was willing to advance southward out of Milan slowly enough to give Cesare time to do as he wished without interference. Preparations for an offensive against Florence, they suggested, were already under way. They spoke of how fast Cesare was capable of moving—meaning how little time he would need.

Much of this was the opposite of the truth. Machiavelli was right in surmising that Louis would never let Cesare, or anyone else, seize control of Florence and Tuscany. On that very morning, though no one in Urbino had any way of knowing it, part of the king’s army was departing
Milan with two related assignments: to see to it that Florence was left alone, and to force Vitelli and Baglioni out of Tuscany. Ignorant though he was of these developments, Machiavelli must have seen through the Orsinis’ pose. He knew Paolo’s reputation—knew that, though capable of talking tough, he was an unstable character, so unsteady under pressure that his own troops called him “Madonna” Orsini and not because of any maternal concern for their well-being. And that Giulio, though a more impressive fighting man than his cousin—the Borgias would learn to their cost just how relentless a foe he could be—had a reputation for deviousness second only to that of his brother, the fork-tongued Cardinal Giovanni Battista Orsini. Machiavelli and the bishop would have suspected from the start that this encounter was no accident, and that Cesare had instructed the cousins in what to say in order to frighten the
signori
of Florence and prompt them to come to terms.

That night, hours after sundown, Soderini and Machiavelli were escorted back to the ducal palace to meet again with Cesare. This eccentric scheduling, if partly tactical on Cesare’s part, was also a reflection of his youth: he still had a young man’s inclination, which he indulged with an insouciance that could infuriate even the pope, to stay up all night and sleep the morning away. This time, his visitors soon saw, there were to be no more amusing preliminaries, no verbal sparring, no subtleties to be interpreted at leisure. Cesare began where he had ended the night before, with an ultimatum. Florence had to decide whether it was with him or against him. And now there was a deadline: he would give the
signoria
four days to reach its decision and not an hour more. If he had received no answer after four days, Cesare would, as he vaguely but ominously put it, act in accord with his own interests. His insistence that everything be settled quickly seemed to Machiavelli a confirmation of his suspicions. The duke, he felt sure, hoped to be able to present Louis of France with a fait accompli in which king, republic, and Borgias were all allies but Florence was in a distinctly submissive role.

Soderini and Machiavelli spent the rest of the night drafting a report that, immediately upon completion, they handed to a mounted courier for delivery to Florence with all possible speed. A few hours later, after snatching a bit of sleep, Machiavelli too set out on the seventy-mile
ride home. He and the bishop had agreed that one of them had better return home to explain some of the subtleties barely touched on in their report. Soderini, as senior member of the delegation, would remain in Urbino, doing what he could to keep Cesare’s impatience under control while being careful to promise him nothing.

Ironically, the whole drama came to nothing. The Florentine authorities, benefiting from Machiavelli’s account of what he had witnessed in Urbino and his interpretation of the situation, found excuses to delay their response. They sent word back to Cesare that, eager though they were to cooperate, it seemed advisable to commit to nothing until the pope and King Louis had been consulted. This was so unanswerable, so impossible to object to, that it sent Cesare into a white-hot rage and Soderini racing out of Urbino in fear for his life. When French couriers reached Cesare with orders not to disturb Florence but instead to dislodge Vitelli and Baglioni from Arezzo, the game was up, his bluff called.

Unwilling to settle for doing nothing with the army he had mustered at such cost, Cesare sent a body of troops hurrying south in an attack on Camerino. There, at least, things went well. When the old warlord Giulio Cesare Varano tried to organize a defense, his subjects pushed him aside and insisted on immediate surrender. They opened their gates to the invaders, becoming the latest city to fall into Cesare’s hands without a fight. Compared to Florence and Bologna, however, Camerino was a small prize of little strategic value. Though Varano had been promised his freedom in return for surrender, he was thrown into a cell. He would die there after a few months, and the three of his sons who had been captured with him would then be done away with.

Vitelli and Baglioni, meanwhile, persisted in refusing to pull out of Arezzo and the Val di Chiana. They continued to do so even when a body of Louis XII’s troops arrived on the scene, yielding only—and angrily—when Cesare warned that if they did not withdraw, he would attack their home cities of Città di Castello and Perugia. Quite apart from their wish to hurt Florence, both found this an excruciating reverse. As they saw the situation, they had taken Arezzo and the Val da Chiana fair and square, Florence had proved incapable of taking either place back, and had they been allowed to maintain possession, their domains would have been wonderfully enhanced and their place in the
hierarchy of Italian tyrants raised correspondingly. Baglioni, however, knew what it was to lose everything and had no wish to repeat the experience. Early in his bloody career he had been driven out of Perugia by cousins who slaughtered his immediate family and barely missed killing him as well. It was Vitelli who had helped him to retake the city in 1500 and had joined him in butchering as many of the enemy Baglioni, women and children included, as could be stopped from escaping. That had cemented the relationship between the two men, making Baglioni a substitute for Vitelli’s executed brother, but it had put a limit on Baglioni’s appetite for risk. He was ready to go home, and his decision left Vitelli with no choice but to do likewise.