The Borgias (6 page)

Though there is no evidence that Alonso de Borja participated in the council’s debates—no evidence, even, that he attended any of its sessions—its actions presented him with vexing questions. As a loyal subject of Aragon and a junior member of its clergy, he had always been disposed to follow the lead of its rulers, and Benedict like himself was a respected legal scholar and above reproach in his personal life. That Benedict had been repudiated by a general council of the Church, however, was not to be shrugged off lightly. Further complications included the council’s assertion, even as it made Martin V pope, that he was subject to it because councils were the highest authority in the Church, and Martin’s rejoinder that he and not the council was supreme. The result was the greatest challenge to papal authority until the Reformation, which was still a century in the future. The uncertainty to which these disagreements gave rise was offensive to Borja’s lawyerly mind and must be one reason why, at about this point, he began to express two convictions. First, that Church unity was the only alternative to chaos. Second, that unity was impossible if the pope was not supreme.

These beliefs were firmly in place when, in 1417, the fortyish Borja made his first visit to the court of the charismatic young Alfonso V, whose kingdom of Aragon had long since absorbed Valencia. Possibly he had been summoned to explain the decrees coming out of Constance; this would have been natural in light of the support that Alfonso and his father before him had extended to the Spanish antipopes, and
the questions of law stirred up by the contest between the council and Martin V. Whatever the reason for the visit, it proved to be important in the king’s life and the great turning point in Borja’s.

Alfonso V at twenty-one was ruler not only of Aragon but of Sicily too. That was enough to make him as powerful as any monarch in Europe, and he was already launched upon the campaigns that would add Corsica and Sardinia to his empire. And he was glamorous as well as important. Short but strongly built, with a small hawklike nose and the penetrating gaze of a born predator, he had a grace and a flair for the theatrical gesture that would win him the honorific “Alfonso the Magnanimous.”
He was also intelligent and witty (happy marriage, he said, required that the wife be blind and the husband deaf) and radiated a sunny self-assurance. Clearly he saw something that he liked in the lawyer from Lérida, even if that lawyer was dry and cautious and nobody’s idea of a man of action. Borja for his part must have been flattered to find himself attracting the interest of such a
kingly
young king, even one whose views were not entirely compatible with his own. When the visitor was offered employment at Alfonso’s court, there can have been little hesitation. His whole life, his place in the world, was utterly transformed. In short order he was the king’s secretary and principal counselor and therefore at the center of European affairs.

Alfonso no less than Borja faced delicate questions. Ridiculous as the current Spanish claimant to the papal crown might appear to be (he called himself Clement VIII and had been elected by three men whom Benedict XIII had proclaimed to be cardinals shortly before his death), he continued to be recognized by the House of Aragon, and a faint aura of prestige clung to him as a result. Though Alfonso stood to gain nothing by keeping the schism alive, abandoning a cause with which his family had long been identified would have been no simple step. If not taken carefully, it could look like an admission of failure. Alfonso had no tolerance for failure.

It fell to his new secretary to find a way forward. And so when in 1421 Alfonso arrived in Naples in response to Queen Joanna II’s appeal for help in fending off a French attack—the childless and only dubiously sane queen had found the perfect way to recruit him, declaring him to be her heir—he immediately and at Borja’s suggestion sent off a letter offering Pope Martin his friendship. He had every reason to expect a
positive response. Martin, having recently returned the pontifical court to the Eternal City after many years of exile, seemed unlikely to want to continue an old and costly feud. He had barely begun the hard task of restoring order in Rome and the adjacent Papal States, and he was encountering enough opposition from the Orsini and others to need no trouble with Spain. Alonso de Borja, who had remained behind in Aragon as head of a council advising Queen Maria, her husband’s regent, must have waited hopefully for word of a rapprochement—and been taken aback to learn that the pope had instead allied himself with Queen Joanna’s enemy, the Frenchman Louis of Anjou, who claimed to be rightful king of Naples. Worse news followed: Alfonso had retaliated by reaffirming Clement VIII as pope. Borja’s plan for reconciliation had come to nothing—had, if anything, made things worse. He had learned that the politics of Italy were too tricky to be managed, or even understood, from where he sat in Spain. Prudent lawyer that he was, he turned his attention to business closer to home and tried to keep it there.

Alfonso V meanwhile threw himself into a war for Naples that dragged on year after year. Its complexities and reversals would require a chapter of their own, and even then would be barely comprehensible. After two years of fighting, Joanna announced that Louis of Anjou, not Alfonso, was now her heir, and therefore her erstwhile rescuer was now an interloper and a foe. As the advantage shifted sporadically from side to side, it began to seem that the bloodshed might continue forever. Atrocities and outrages became almost commonplace. Mercenaries in Louis’s service, having killed Alfonso’s beloved brother Pedro with a lucky shot, celebrated their success by firing his corpse out of a cannon. When in 1423 Alfonso had to return to Spain to deal with an outbreak of hostilities between another brother, Juan king of Navarre, and his brother-in-law Juan king of Castile, he interrupted his voyage to pay a call on Marseilles, the capital of the House of Anjou. He tried twice to set it afire and both times was foiled by rain. He declared that if it happened a third time, he would accept failure as God’s will and move on, but there was no more rain, and Alfonso had the rare satisfaction of reducing a major city to ashes before weighing anchor and continuing on his way.

He was still in Spain when, a year later, news of the defeat of his army in Naples and the killing of its commander had an improving effect on
his view of the situation. He decided that fighting a pope who had the support of most of Europe and insisting on the legitimacy of a powerless and largely forgotten Spaniard were never going to get him anywhere, and that a fresh approach was in order. Alonso de Borja agreed heartily—had long, in fact, been suggesting a change of course. He appealed to the king not by invoking Church unity, which was unlikely to matter greatly to an energetic young monarch bent on conquest, but by pointing to the practical advantages of getting the pope to endorse his claim to Naples. There was nothing to be lost, and so the king freed his secretary to see what diplomacy might accomplish.

It accomplished great things. Negotiations began, the pope was receptive, and a tentative settlement was worked out. Martin conceded, somewhat obliquely, that Alfonso just might have a valid claim to Naples. Borja, and through him Alfonso, acknowledged that Martin just might be the true pope. Building on this, in 1429 Borja went to the trouble of seeking out Antipope Clement at his hideaway in the remote Valencian town of Peníscola. There, offering as inducement the bishopric of Palma on the island of Mallorca, he persuaded Clement to make submission to Rome. With this, the royal House of Aragon abandoned its long repudiation of the Roman popes, king and pontiff were reconciled, and after almost half a century the Great Schism was at an end at last. A grateful pope announced Borja’s appointment as bishop of Valencia. This must have been deeply gratifying: Valencia was not only one of Spain’s richest sees but the Borja family’s home diocese. The appointment raised the Borja name to an eminence never before achieved, and it made Alonso a hero to his relatives. Among these relatives were his widowed sister and her children, who took up residence in Valencia’s grand episcopal palace. In order to become bishop, he had to take a step he had until now neglected: have himself ordained a priest.

The leaders of the Council of Constance had been ready to adjourn since 1418, but they feared that by disbanding they would free the pope to repudiate everything they had done. As a preventive measure they decreed that a new council must be convened after five years, with another seven years after that, and others every ten years thereafter. Pope Martin, though no friendlier to councils than his predecessors had been and his successors would be, found it impossible to avoid calling one in 1423. This new assembly, however, was so paralyzed by political divisions
as to be unable to act. It accomplished little beyond reaffirming the supremacy of councils and scheduling another gathering for the Swiss city of Basel in 1431.

Martin died early in 1431 and was succeeded by the wealthy and handsomely aristocratic Cardinal Gabriele Condulmer of Venice, who became Eugenius IV. He was only forty-seven, some six years younger than the fledgling bishop of Valencia. Devoid of political experience and gifts, almost from the first day of his reign he began committing blunders. Ultimately, as we saw earlier, he so undermined his own position as to be obliged to depart Rome under a barrage of sticks and stones.

After years in exile, an exasperated Eugenius excommunicated everyone associated with Basel and called for an alternative assembly to convene at Ferrara. In response, the council denounced him as a heretic and voted to depose him. As replacement, it elected a new antipope, the onetime duke of Savoy, who had taken holy orders after the death of his wife and now styled himself Felix V. In all this the council was supported by the duke of Milan and, to the chagrin of Alonso de Borja, by Alfonso V. Everything the bishop had accomplished late in the reign of Martin V was thus in ruins, and disorder seemed to be spreading by the day. Fate almost seemed to be mocking him for attaching such importance to unity and a strong papacy.

When Alfonso V returned to Italy and took up once again the war for Naples, he brought Borja with him. Unhappy with almost everything that was happening, the bishop nevertheless continued the management of his master’s affairs and undertook a reform of the judicial system in the territories Alfonso controlled. Among his responsibilities was overseeing the education of Alfonso’s illegitimate son Ferdinand, who was in his early teens. This boy, known as Ferrante, was already a significant figure because his father’s marriage to the sickly and sadly unattractive Princess Maria of Castile had produced no offspring. Alfonso, resigned to the fact that when he died most of his sprawling empire would be inherited by his brother Juan or Juan’s son Ferdinand, was becoming obsessed with the thought that the great kingdom of Naples, if he could win it, should go to Ferrante. Meanwhile Borja was getting to know Ferrante and forming an opinion of the boy’s character that would have consequences in years to come.

The bishop refused to conceal his disapproval of the king’s friendliness
toward the Council of Basel and its antipope.
When Alfonso appointed him envoy to Basel, he took the astonishing step of refusing to go. When Eugenius ordered the council to move to Florence and some of the delegates obeyed while others remained defiantly in Basel, Borja signaled his support of the pope by going to Florence in person, possibly without the king’s approval. It is testimony to how much Alfonso valued the bishop’s services that he retained him as chief minister in spite of their differences on such a painfully divisive question.

The war for Naples appeared to have ended in disaster for Alfonso when, in the mid-1430s, another lost battle caused him to become the prisoner of Milan’s vicious Duke Filippo Maria Visconti, a supporter of Louis of Anjou and always an eager troublemaker. Almost miraculously, considering that to fall into the sadistic Filippo Maria’s hands often meant either a gruesome death or lifelong imprisonment under unspeakable conditions, Alfonso talked the duke into releasing him. He did so by arguing—his success shows the force of his personality—that it would be better for Milan if he became king of Naples and the Angevins were expelled.

Alfonso’s release marked a turning point in his fortunes. When in 1442 he finally crushed his Angevin rivals and sent them scurrying back to France, the way was cleared for the resolution of an array of long-festering issues. By the time he entered the city of Naples, the Council of Basel had lost all credibility. Though it remained in session, even Felix V had tired of its sterile debates and departed. With both council and antipope reduced to near-irrelevance, Alfonso V (now Alfonso I of Naples as well) and Pope Eugenius were free to turn their attention to each other. What they saw—what Alonso de Borja encouraged them to understand—was that they had more to gain by coming to terms than by continuing their dispute. Because Naples was recognized by all Europe as a papal fief, no one could legitimately rule it without the approval of—without being formally invested in it by—the Roman pontiff. Alfonso would never be accepted as its king until some pope recognized him as such, the sooner the better. Felix, from Geneva, offered to do the investing, but he had so little standing by this time that the suggestion could not be taken seriously.

Eugenius for his part would be denying reality if he refused to accept the Aragonese conquest of Naples. Nothing could come of that but
more years of trouble. All the elements needed for agreement were obviously in place, and so negotiations got under way with Borja once again representing the king. By the terms of the resulting Treaty of Terracina, Alfonso recognized Eugenius as pope and received investiture as king of Naples. For the second time in a decade and a half, Alonso de Borja had reunited the Western Church. Eugenius felt it safe to return to Rome, which during his years of exile had sunk into a wretched state of lawlessness.

Pope and king embarked upon a political honeymoon. In 1444 the grateful Eugenius made Borja a cardinal and presbyter of the church of Santi Quattro Coronati on Rome’s Coelian Hill. He did so not in response to any appeal from Alfonso V or as a political favor to Naples but in recognition of Borja’s services to the Church. That same year, assenting to something that his new royal friend desired almost as urgently as he had wanted Naples, Eugenius legitimated the twenty-one-year-old Ferrante. Alfonso celebrated this as a coup, one that opened the way for Ferrante to succeed him on the throne of Naples. Cardinal Borja was not the only legal scholar to find this a dubious proposition; there were old and widespread doubts about whether legitimization brought with it a right of succession.