The Borgias (65 page)

It somehow came to pass that, when Cesare’s men at Cesena and the little town of Bertinoro at last gave up and marched out of their strongholds with music playing and flags unfurled, news of their surrender reached Ostia before Rome. Cardinal Carvajal, satisfied that Cesare had fulfilled the terms of his deal with the pope, told him he was free to go. Whether the Spaniard Carvajal acted so hastily in order to save Cesare’s life we do not know, but it is not hard to believe that Julius, given a choice, would have locked Cesare away forever, or killed him, rather than granting him his freedom. Yet it was not he but Cesare who now faced a monumental decision: whether to again go north, to the court of Louis XII, or instead go south to Gonsalvo, Naples, and Spain.

Perhaps it is going too far to say that in opting to go south he made the one truly ruinous decision of his life, but not by a wide margin. In France he was still duke of Valentinois, with a royal wife and child, and it must have seemed possible that the king who had given him both title and bride could be won over once again. Certainly Louis XII had little enough reason to think of Cesare as an enemy. He might very well have found his old friend and protégé Valentino useful in consolidating France’s position in the north in the aftermath of his generals’ disastrous failures.

Why then did Cesare turn his back on France and go to Naples instead? Not only, surely, because one of his numerous cardinal cousins, another Pedro Luis Lanzol Borgia, was now in Naples himself after fleeing Rome and had sent a galley to Ostia to pick him up. Perhaps because so many other members of his family were already in Naples: not only the cardinal but Jofrè Borgia as well and his wife Sancia, now the mistress of Prospero Colonna. Perhaps too because Gonsalvo’s victories over the French made the Spanish seem the more sensible choice. Perhaps the astrologers had a hand in it. Whatever the reason, Cesare boarded the cardinal’s galley and allowed it to take him south. In doing so he extinguished whatever affection Louis XII might still have felt for him.

Cesare spent three happy weeks in Naples, enthusiastically making preparations for a return to the Romagna, asking Gonsalvo for financial
help and evidently expecting to get it. Unbeknown to him, however, Pope Julius was in communication both with Gonsalvo and with the Roman agents of Ferdinand and Isabella, asking that Cesare be kept under close watch and prevented from making trouble. From Spain, Gonsalvo received instructions that under no circumstances was he to allow Cesare to slip out of his hands.

On the night of May 26, having completed preparations to leave Naples by galley, Cesare visited Gonsalvo to say farewell and was stunned to find himself placed under arrest. He was taken to the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples and confined there under increasingly harsh circumstances, consigned at last to a chamber so diabolically uncomfortable that it was known as “the oven.” Lucrezia, knowing of his plans to return to the Romagna but not of his arrest, had managed to raise enough money to hire a thousand soldiers, put them under the command of the Borgia loyalist Pedro Ramires, and send them off to join him. Ramires did not get far before learning that Cesare was not to be expected. Seeing that there was nothing to be done, he turned back. That other Cesare loyalist, Michelotto, was meanwhile still a prisoner in Rome, Pope Julius continuing without success to attempt to extract from him dark Borgia secrets that might or might not have existed. Eventually he would be released, find employment in Florence with Machiavelli’s help, and be murdered under circumstances that have never been explained.

On August 20, Cesare was put aboard a galley that joined a flotilla commanded by the same Prospero Colonna whom he had tricked in departing Rome after Alexander’s death. They were bound for Spain, and upon arrival Cesare was confined in a remote castle at Chinchilla in the mountainous backcountry of his native Valencia. Though in no way mistreated—he was allowed a cadre of personal servants and even a mistress—he is not likely to have had much opportunity to keep abreast of what was happening far away. To the great questions of the hour he had become irrelevant, and his chances of being set free were reduced to zero by Isabella of Spain’s hostility—she wanted him tried for the murders of the dukes of Gandía and Bisceglie—and by Pope Julius II’s refusal to have him back in Italy. Lucrezia and his brother-in-law Juan king of Navarre sent appeals for clemency but achieved nothing. It was entirely possible that Cesare, like Ludovico Sforza of
Milan and the heir to the last Aragonese king of Naples, would spend the rest of his days a prisoner.

Though he evidently still had substantial funds in banks in northern Italy, any effort to retrieve them would have attracted the attention of the agents of the pope, who was himself in financial straits and bent on seizing Cesare’s assets wherever he could find them. In the spring of 1505, acting on Cesare’s behalf, Juan of Navarre appealed to Louis XII for payment of the dowry that the new Duke Valentino had been promised at the time of his betrothal to Charlotte d’Albret. He was curtly refused. Frustration at this rebuff may help to explain a bizarre event that shortly followed. One day during a conversation atop the ramparts at Chinchilla, Cesare suddenly hurled himself upon the castle’s governor, apparently intending to throw him to his death. Instead Cesare was overpowered and injured in the course of being subdued. Not long thereafter he was moved to the great fortress of La Mota at Medina del Campo northwest of Madrid. This was one of the favorite residences of Ferdinand and Isabella, high-walled, stoutly built, and always heavily guarded. There he was confined under far more austere circumstances than at Chinchilla.

This move is likely to have been partly the result of the death, late in the previous year, of Queen Isabella. Her passing had left Cesare’s fate in the hands—or so it seemed, for the time being—of her husband Ferdinand. This opened a whole range of new possibilities: the Spanish king was far too cynical and self-serving to attach any importance to his wife’s righteous view of Cesare as a moral lost cause, too monstrous ever to be set free. For Ferdinand, by contrast, the only question was whether Cesare might in some way be made useful. Being himself without scruples—a decade hence he would be gulling his young son-in-law Henry VIII of England, drawing him into an unnecessary war with France and then deserting him as soon as his own aims had been accomplished—Ferdinand was incapable of trusting anyone. In 1505 his suspicions were focused on his viceroy in Naples, Gonsalvo the Great Captain. Gonsalvo was as loyal an agent as any king had ever had, and his achievements first in Granada and then in Italy should have made Ferdinand grateful for his existence. The opposite was true, however; the death of Isabella removed the only restraint on Ferdinand’s dark imaginings, and in short order he became convinced that Gonsalvo was
scheming to seize Naples for himself. He began to consider not only releasing Cesare but sending him to Naples at the head of an army, and the transfer from Chinchilla to Medina del Campo may have been a first step in that direction. Cesare’s assignment would be to replace Gonsalvo—or to subdue him if he declined to stand aside.

Cesare, if he learned of this possibility, must have been ecstatic; such an assignment would at a stroke have returned him to prominence in Italy. But it was not to be; the complications were too numerous and too imposing. Ferdinand wanted the friendship of Pope Julius and knew that gaining it would be impossible if he injected Cesare back into Italian affairs. Also, Ferdinand was at this time looking for ways to improve his relations with France. His gestures in that direction would have no chance of success if he freed the onetime protégé whom Louis XII now despised as a traitor.

And it soon developed that Cesare was not Ferdinand’s to do with as he wished after all. He belonged, instead, to Ferdinand’s son-in-law Philip of Hapsburg, Philip the Handsome so called, with whom the king had a poisonously bad relationship. Philip was the husband of Ferdinand’s eldest surviving daughter, Juana, who as a result of her mother Isabella’s death was now queen of Castile, and the couple had two small sons. It was a bitter fact, for Ferdinand, that his and Isabella’s son Juan had died at nineteen, leaving a pregnant bride whose child was later stillborn, and that the daughter who now wore the crown of Castile and was heir to that of Aragon was producing healthy male offspring for the German House of Hapsburg. It meant that everything Ferdinand and Isabella had built together in three decades of scheming and danger and hard toil would pass after his death from their ancient House of Trastámara to a tribe of grasping Germans.

Philip deepened Ferdinand’s chagrin by demanding to be recognized as king of Castile, not just its new queen’s consort. Thus it proved to matter a great deal that Medina del Campo and its castle were in Castile rather than Aragon, so that Cesare was no longer in Ferdinand’s custody but in that of Juana and Philip, neither of whom had any wish to put him at the old king’s disposal. Less than a year after Isabella’s death, Ferdinand would attempt to foil Philip by marrying a seventeen-year-old French princess for the purpose of providing himself with a new male heir; any such son would have been first in Aragon’s line of succession,
ahead of Juana and her brood. And after three years of trying, presumably with the help of the virility potions concocted by his physicians, Ferdinand would succeed in getting his queen with child. In May 1509 she gave birth to the hoped-for son, but the child lived only hours. That was still in the future, however, when in September 1506 Philip suddenly died at Burgos, probably of typhoid. His death left Cesare at the mercy of Queen Juana, who had been taught by her late mother to regard him as the devil incarnate and was beginning to behave in the ways that would cause her to be remembered as Juana the Mad. The first thing that raised questions about her sanity was her refusal to have her husband buried and her insistence on taking his corpse with her wherever she traveled. Possibly with the encouragement of Cesare’s sister-in-law the dowager duchess of Gandía, widow of the Juan Borgia who had been murdered in Rome in 1497, she carried out her late mother’s wish by having Cesare indicted for the murders of his brother and his brother-in-law the duke of Bisceglie. A trial would presumably follow.

All was not lost, however. With Philip the Handsome and Queen Isabella both dead, Juana losing her wits, and Ferdinand setting out to confront Gonsalvo in Naples personally, discipline at La Mota began to go slack. Cesare’s keepers evidently saw him as a man who still had a future, who might eventually be powerful once again and was therefore worth cultivating. Certainly they were open to suasion and bribery. With the help of the governor at La Mota, one Cárdenas, Cesare was able to secure a length of strong rope and make arrangements for an escape.

On the night of October 25, with a small party of mounted confederates waiting below, he climbed out the window of his chamber high in La Mota’s walls and began lowering himself down the rope. A watchman saw what was happening and sounded the alarm, a guard entered the chamber and cut the rope, and Cesare was injured as he fell to the ground. He was put on a horse all the same and taken to a remote property belonging to Governor Cárdenas. He remained there a month, a hunted fugitive, and when able to travel was moved in secret to the port of Castres and put aboard a ship bound for Navarre.
Evidently he remained a semi-invalid at this point: someone whose path he crossed described him as “a man doubled up, with an ugly face, a big nose, dark.”
When storms forced his ship into a fishing port, Cesare was obliged to continue on muleback. Finally, however, he made his way to Navarre’s capital of Pamplona, a city he had never seen in spite of having had its bishopric conferred upon him as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy. He was described as descending on the little city “like the devil.” Presumably this was a reference to his appearance after weeks on the run and much hardship.

Once settled in Pamplona, he wasted no time before setting out to recover at least some of his old importance. He dispatched envoys to Italy, sending with them letters to various individuals whom he thought might be inclined to help—for example Francesco Gonzaga, marquess of Mantua, who was deeply infatuated with his sister-in-law Lucrezia Borgia d’Este, now duchess of Ferrara following the death of her husband’s father. In these letters Cesare signed himself duke of Romagna, signaling that the Romagna was where he hoped to reestablish himself. The lack of response showed that he could expect no assistance in that regard. Gonzaga at this time was employed as captain-general of the forces with which Pope Julius II—following Cesare’s example—had recently driven the Baglioni out of Perugia and the Bentivoglii out of Bologna. That he would break with an imperious and increasingly powerful pope for the sake of the penniless Cesare in his distant refuge was inconceivable even if his young son and heir was, supposedly, still betrothed to Cesare’s daughter Louisa.

As for Pope Julius himself, sensitive to Cesare’s popularity in the Romagna and mindful of the difficulties that his return could stir up, he saw no reason to be friendly or even neutral. When a representative sent by Cesare called on him at Bologna, of which he was taking personal possession after the expulsion of the Bentivoglii, Julius had the unfortunate man thrown into prison. Lucrezia appears to have been alone in daring to request his release, and as before her appeals were politely denied.

At about this same time Louis XII refused a request for restoration of the revenues to which Cesare had once been entitled as duke of Valentinois. Cesare therefore was left without prospects in Italy, France, or Spain—without any friends at all among the crowned heads of Europe, aside from his brother-in-law Juan of Navarre. Juan, being not only short of funds but faced with a rebellion in which Ferdinand of Spain,
Louis of France, and Maximilian of Hapsburg were all meddling, could offer Cesare one thing only: command of the Navarrese army.
Now recovered from his injuries—he was described at about this time as “a big man, strong, handsome, and in the full flight of his manhood”—he was soon directing the siege of a rebel fortress at Viana.