The Borgias (7 page)

In 1445 Borja took up residence in Rome. Presumably he was expected to serve as Alfonso’s representative at the papal court, but it is likely that he felt he had done quite enough for an insatiably ambitious king and was weary of being asked to untangle his affairs. In any case, once settled in an old palace in a quiet quarter between the ruins of the Colosseum and the almost as ancient Basilica of St. John Lateran, he showed less interest in political matters than in his gardens. The only issue that could still draw him out was the old, perennially unresolved question of papal authority. When a dispute between the Vatican and the German Church was settled toward the end of Eugenius’s life, Borgia (as his name was now spelled in Rome) was one of only two cardinals to complain that too much had been conceded that rightfully belonged to the pope. For the most part he lived the life of a retired and beneficent dignitary, a patron of charitable institutions rather than of artists, architects, and scholars. As a Spaniard he was very much an outsider, but he seems to have been content with that. He kept to the margins of Roman society, staffing his residence with countrymen from Spain and opening
it, unenthusiastically on the whole, to the relatives who were migrating to Italy in the hope that having a kinsman who was a cardinal could put opportunities in their path.

When in February 1447 Eugenius IV died at age sixty-two, Borgia was already sixty-eight. And though he now was, because a cardinal, eligible for election, at no point in that year’s conclave was he mentioned as a possible candidate. Nor does he appear to have taken any significant part in the politicking, even when the Orsini-Colonna deadlock made it impossible for either family’s candidate to be chosen. The winner who ultimately emerged, the famously brilliant Cardinal Tommaso Parentucelli, was only forty-nine years old, young enough to be Borgia’s son. Though small and oddly shriveled in appearance, with tiny dark birdlike eyes, the new Pope Nicholas was in good enough health, lived simply, and had great plans both for the papacy and for the city of Rome. There could have seemed little possibility that the elderly Cardinal Borgia would live to see another conclave, and no possibility at all that he would ever be in contention for the papal crown.

2

Surprises, Disappointments, Hope

There is reason to surmise that one man only may have been less than flabbergasted by Cardinal Alonso Borgia’s elevation to the pontifical throne, and that the man in question was Alonso himself.

This possibility arises out of virtually the only interesting story about Alonso’s early life to have come down to us—a tale that must have some sort of basis in fact, because Alonso himself appears to have believed it.

According to this story, at some point in his boyhood Alonso crossed paths with a famous holy man and preacher named Vincente Ferrer, a Spanish friar descended through his father from Scottish nobility. That such an encounter took place is in no way implausible. Ferrer, famous for working wonders and for converting huge numbers of Jews using methods that would raise eyebrows in later centuries, was a celebrated figure in Valencia in the late fourteenth century, attracting crowds wherever he appeared. He also took a doctorate in theology at the same University of Lérida where Alonso would later study and teach law.

Be all that as it may, upon meeting Alonso, Ferrer is supposed to have declared that the child would one day achieve “the highest authority which mortal man can obtain”—words that any educated European of the time would have understood as referring to the papacy. Alonso is said to have taken the prophecy to heart, and to have waited serenely for its fulfillment as men younger and still younger than himself were
elected instead. All we know with certainty is that, as one of his first acts after becoming Pope Calixtus III, he saw to it that Vincente Ferrer was canonized. Today a handsome church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan bears his name.

Calixtus’s reign got off to a fast start. It was also a rocky start: on the day of the new pope’s coronation, packs of toughs affiliated with the Orsini and the Colonna roamed the streets of Rome claiming to be offended that a “Catalan” had become pope, looking for opportunities to make trouble. They so disrupted one procession that the aged pontiff was nearly thrown from his horse. The trouble was worst, predictably, wherever rival prowling gangs collided. It rose to a fever pitch when the chief of the Bracciano branch of the Orsini, Napoleone by name, tried to use the growing disorder to take revenge on an old foe. By the time the papal retinue with its eighty bishops all dressed in white had moved past the ruins of the Forum and the Colosseum and reached the Basilica of St. John Lateran, it was inching its way through something between a full-blown riot and a miniature war. Houses were being looted and set on fire. Onlookers were being attacked, even killed.

The former Alonso Borgia, a man known for nothing so much as for being “peaceable and kindly,” the dark-horse candidate who had been made pope precisely because none of his fellow cardinals could imagine him interfering in their affairs, turned to the proud and powerful Cardinal Latino Orsini, who as it happened was Napoleone’s brother, and ordered him to control his family.
Now. Or else
. Order was restored, the pope had put his mark on his first day in office with a forcefulness he had rarely if ever displayed in Rome, and the Orsini had been given a foretaste of the half-century of Borgia difficulties that lay in store for them.

That was nothing compared to the surprises that followed, and the speed with which Calixtus began producing them. His health so poor that on many mornings he was unable to get out of bed, he nevertheless began drawing upon previously unsuspected reserves of energy—and upon a long agenda of things he was determined to accomplish. He summoned secretaries to his bedside one after another, gave them instructions or dictated letters and bulls in a seemingly endless flow, and sent them bustling off on a bewildering variety of missions. At the center of this whirlwind, overshadowing everything else, was a subject to
which Calixtus’s predecessor Nicholas V had paid the necessary lip service but rarely given real priority: the Turks.

By the time of Calixtus III’s election, the Turks had been in Europe for more than a century. With the exception of a brief period around 1400, when Mongol hordes swept through the Middle East on a vast raid that threw everything into disorder until the invaders abruptly turned around and galloped back to eastern Asia, the Ottoman armies were as voracious and seemingly unstoppable as a plague of locusts. By stages they devoured so much of the old Byzantine Christian Empire that at midcentury almost nothing remained of it except the capital, Constantinople, enfeebled almost to the point of helplessness.

Sultan Mehmed II, only twenty-three when Calixtus became pope but already as feared as anyone then living, was a worthily warlike link in a chain of land-hungry fathers and sons whose empire would ultimately encompass substantial parts of three continents and last more than six hundred years. His forefathers had emerged in the thirteenth century as heads of one of the ten or so little principalities that came to dot Anatolia (in what is now Turkey) as the Eastern Christian Empire lost its grip there. The dynasty that would take its name from the second man to head it, the emir Osman I, was consistently both more aggressive and more successful than its neighbors and began absorbing them one by one. Osman’s grandson Murad I achieved such eminence that by the 1370s he was minting his own coins and using the title “sultan”—a word connoting sovereignty, and religious as well as political authority.

Mehmed II was Murad I’s great-grandson, and by the time of his birth in 1432 the unique phenomenon that was Ottoman culture was pretty much fully formed. Among the striking features of that culture were a pervasive and remarkably creative use of slavery, polygamy on an epic scale, royal fratricide as government policy, and ingenious ways of controlling subject populations vastly more numerous than the Turks themselves. Slavery, so integral to the empire that at its zenith one in every five residents of Constantinople was officially in bondage, took such novel forms under the sultans that it became a major source of their strength. Osman I and his descendants made the improbable discovery that prisoners of war, especially the youngest of them, could be turned not only into useful fighting men but into fiercely loyal ones.
This led to the creation of a system for recruiting talent on a massive scale through systematic abduction. Every five years the sultan’s troops would scour his Christian domains (Serbia and Bulgaria, for example, and the Greek communities of Anatolia), round up thousands of boys between ten and perhaps fifteen years of age, select the strongest and brightest, and carry them off. They would be lodged with Turkish families long enough to learn the language and receive basic instruction in Islam, and then be placed on the bottom rungs of career ladders leading to the most powerful positions in the army and navy, the imperial bureaucracy, and municipal and provincial government. Legally these youngsters remained slaves, but they were slaves with far more opportunities than most of the supposedly free people of the time. Eventually the empire came to be managed mainly by men whose careers had begun with their being stolen from their parents. They could be considered slaves only in the sense of being—like everyone else in the empire—absolutely subject to the will of the sultan.

This system didn’t merely work, it worked brilliantly. The harvesting of children gave the Turks a force of so-called janissaries that was one of the wonders of the age: not only the first large-scale standing army to be seen in Europe since classical times, but the first recognizably modern army. The janissaries were salaried, wore uniforms, lived in barracks, marched in time to music, and were trained to a level of discipline and efficiency that had no equal elsewhere. They also became great innovators, pioneers, for example, in the use of muskets and artillery. (The walls of Constantinople, during the siege that ended in the city’s fall, were reduced to rubble by huge stone balls fired from the Turks’ twenty-six-foot cannons, the doomsday weapons of their time.) What was perhaps most improbable, janissaries were as a rule almost fanatically faithful to their masters. And why not? The most talented and ambitious of them could achieve high rank at an early age and all the good things that success brought with it.

The Turks trafficked in women as well—they would continue to do so into the twentieth century—but the world of their female slaves was vastly more limited than that of the janissaries. The capture of young women was one of the primary objectives of the sultan’s troops when they went plundering, and their raids on foreign territory yielded bountiful supplies of salable flesh. The most attractive girls naturally came
into the possession of senior officers, who in turn would pass some of them further up the chain of command until a tiny minority were selected for the sultan’s harem. Thus was perpetuated perhaps the most peculiar characteristic of the Ottoman dynasty: the fact that it was not a family at all in any ordinary sense, but a line of men who had, instead of queens, platoons of women whom they owned and who lived as their pampered prisoners.

Infidelity was made impossible for these women by another famous feature of the sultan’s Topkapi palace: a harem guard force made up of black African slaves who, because their sexual organs had been removed, could not cuckold the monarch. Because Islamic law forbade castration, the Turks purchased these eunuchs as children from such places as Ethiopia, Abyssinia, and Sudan, where slave traders were happy to perform the necessary alterations. The palace also employed white eunuchs drawn from European sources, but these were used in administrative functions rather than as harem guards. Eunuchs, like janissaries, sometimes became the most powerful officials in the empire.

The claustrophobic world of the harem, and the inhabitants’ competition for the attention of the sultan, made it a hotbed of vicious intrigue. The first harem girl to present the sultan with a son, whether before or after he inherited the throne, became by doing so the mother of the imperial heir. This gave her superiority over her harem-mates no matter how lofty their origins—and not a few were daughters of conquered rulers—or how many sons they ultimately produced. The true ruler of the harem, however, was always the sultan’s mother. She was empowered, among other things, to order the execution of her son’s women if she deemed this advisable. She could also, if her son was weak or more interested in self-indulgence than in the duties of his office, become de facto ruler of the empire. Obviously this was a recipe for trouble, producing in every generation a huge supply of surplus younger sons whose frustrated and jealous mothers encouraged their resentments. The results, predictably dire, included rebellion and warfare among the sons of deceased sultans.

Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople and disturber of the peace of Calixtus III, was the son of a sultan who had had to defeat and kill an uncle and a younger brother in order to make himself secure on
the throne. Mehmed’s grandfather too had had to fight his own brothers to the death in order to become sultan, his great-grandfather had ordered the strangulation of a younger brother to nip trouble in the bud, and so on back through the generations. This grim history prompted Mehmed to institute a practice that would persist for centuries: whenever a new sultan took the throne, his younger brothers and half-brothers were put to death. As time passed this answer to the succession problem would be refined in grisly ways. It would become customary for the pregnant members of a dead sultan’s harem to be bundled together in sacks and dropped into the sea. The survivors, whether young or old, spent the rest of their lives in celibate confinement.