The Malice of Fortune (60 page)

Here it is fair to ask why, knowing Valentino’s true nature as I did, I wrote in
The Prince
, “I do not see what better instruction I can give a new prince than the example of Duke Valentino’s actions.” I will not apologize for this judgment, but I will defend it, first noting that I composed my little pamphlet after we Florentines had lost our republic and our
libertas
, and, in fact, all Italy had become much as it remains today, prostrate before foreign monarchs and their armies—as Valentino himself warned. And because principalities and other petty fiefdoms now far outnumber republics in this Italy of ours, my intention was to write a short work on principalities only, without considering that a republic can secure the common good to much better effect than any prince or monarch, however accomplished; this I take up at much greater length in my
Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy
.

My object in
The Prince
was to show defeated Italy a model of her savior, a man as perfect in the bold acquisition of power as Michelangelo Buonarroti’s great marble
David
is a perfect illustration of the human form and divine spirit. Just as Michelangelo did not portray David the murderer and adulterer, I did not represent the entirety of the man I took as my model. Instead, upon the blank page that Valentino presented all of us, I invented my own rare man: a leader of prodigious gifts, unerring judgment, fearless ambition, and profound insight into the ways of men. This Duke Valentino became my own artfully crafted deception, toward a good end: the salvation of Italy.

I am certain that Valentino himself foresaw this, when he made me his witness. He knew that I would hold my own mirror to his face,
and transform him into a hero whose example would live long after his corrupt flesh and evil designs had gone to the Devil. In truth, over the years, I have come to believe that Valentino intended me to read his confession to the Duke of Gandia’s murder, and it was for this reason that he summoned me to the pit. That page torn from a schoolboy’s geometry, however fatal to his own ambitions, was for him a sacred scripture, his book of Genesis. In the beginning, he had not waited on either Fortune or his father, but alone had plotted the
mappa
of his fate.

Nevertheless I would be a hypocrite not to anticipate that the good intentions I brought to
The Prince
will also be the root of some other man’s evil, if only because the way to the house of the Devil is the same for the good man and the bad—and the journey just as necessary for them both. The times change, but the nature of men does not. Such men as Valentino will only find our new age more favorable, and they will tell us that their evils are only necessities of the times. But they will linger in the house of the Devil, savor his vintage, and acquire a taste for it.

Just before I left Rome, I received a large package from the Fugger Bank, containing the pages bundled here but no other word. I did not read them until I returned home, to sit in the library I had inherited from my father, that tiny room on the second floor of my house being the sanctuary most sacred to me. I can only say that my tears, like Damiata’s, are still to be found on those pages. Her words revealed to my intellect what my soul already knew: she had been false only when the fate of her son was at stake. In all other matters, both of the heart and the mind, she had been entirely faithful to me.

In the same manner, Damiata kept her final promise; thereafter, I never saw or heard from her again. Even so, for years she stood at every street corner, glided across every
sala grande
, peered from windows in every city and town. I was certain I saw her at a performance of my
Mandrake
in Florence several years ago—although in my mind she has not aged as I have. Yet her Giovanni would now be—now is, I pray—nearly the same age I was when I fell in love with her.

But fleet time obscures nothing, only sharpening my memories. I
keep my promise to Damiata every day, not just the one afternoon she was content to claim. Soon enough, I will look for her in the next life.

And in truth, she has never left me. Without her abiding presence in my soul, I might have become the Machiavelli of
The Prince
—I needed only Valentino to take me there—but never the Machiavelli of the
Discourses
, and certainly not the Niccolò of the
Mandrake
and the
Clizia
. Without her love, I never would have learned how to love Marietta. Damiata led me to the higher spheres, the brighter light, and showed me the great power of love over all else in this sad world—although I know that you and all my gossip-bench gang are weary of hearing that
canzone
.

So here I finish my account of those beautiful and terrifying deceptions that inspired—and became
—The Prince
. And I leave you with this one truth, which governs all the affairs of mankind: Although Valentino believed otherwise, there is no grand design that can defeat Fortune’s eternal caprice. Only
Amor
can defeat
Fortuna
.

Only great love, as I was told in a lifetime so long ago, can journey beyond the shores of fate.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Research for
The Malice of Fortune
began with the eight volumes of Niccolò Machiavelli’s
Tutte le Opere
, or Complete Works (including fifty-two diplomatic dispatches from his mission to Duke Valentino), as well as hundreds of personal letters, a number of these referring in detail to his time in the Romagna and the dramatic denouement at Sinigaglia (now Senigallia). All of the major events in
The Malice of Fortune
are described in these letters and dispatches, which also offer considerable insight into the Florentine secretary’s admiring but wary relationship with Valentino, his frustration with his own government, and his troubled marriage—as well as his repeated requests to colleagues in Florence for a copy of Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives
.

Machiavelli’s personal correspondence reveals a lifelong fascination with courtesans and actresses, and his sole vice seems to have been a succession of transporting love affairs he confessed to his friends with florid enthusiasm. His kindness to an abused mule is derived from one of the last letters he wrote, shortly before his death in 1527, when he advises his son Guido to treat a young mule that has “gone mad” from overwork by removing its bridle and halter and letting it go “wherever it wants in order to regain its own way of life.”

The notion of Machiavelli as history’s first forensic profiler is based on his unique approach to analyzing events and the men who shaped them, a method unprecedented in its psychological emphasis and penetration. Machiavelli described his technique for “querying” historical figures in a 1513 letter: “I enter the courts of the ancients where … I
am unashamed to converse with them and ask them the reasons for their actions, and they in their humanity answer me … I transport myself into them entirely.”

Leonardo da Vinci left a similarly voluminous if considerably less organized record of his life, comprising thousands of notebook pages that were arbitrarily compiled into “codices” after his death. The eclectic clutter of his studio is attested by his own inventories; his
mappa
of Imola is presently in the collection of the Royal Library at Windsor Castle; and in the summer of 1502 he remarks in one of his notebooks that Vitellozzo Vitelli has promised him a treatise by Archimedes. Both Gian Giacomo Caprotti and Tommaso di Giovanni Masini are well-documented members of his household. All of the details of Leonardo’s anatomical and scientific work, as well as his concepts and terminology, are derived directly from his notebooks. I have also made an original addition to Leonardo’s biography, surmising that his dreadful fascination with vortexes began as a four-year-old, when he witnessed a two-mile-wide tornado that devastated a large area of his native Tuscany in August 1456. And, of course, I offer an explanation for one of the great mysteries of Leonardo’s life: After decades of seeking a patron capable of realizing his visions, why did Leonardo abruptly leave Valentino’s court at the pinnacle of the latter’s ambition and power?

Damiata is mentioned in contemporary accounts as the mistress whom Juan Borgia, Duke of Gandia, set out to visit on the night he was murdered. “Madonna Damiata” was investigated as a suspect in the crime, but faded into obscurity as the pope’s inquiries into his beloved son’s assassination mysteriously came to an abrupt yet indeterminate conclusion. Her lively, erudite character is based on such famously learned courtesans as Veronica Franco and Tullia d’Aragona, as well as Pietro Aretino’s
Dialogues
, a saucy skewering of Rome’s early sixteenth-century courtesan culture.

Zeja
Caterina is based on a Romagnole witch and healer named Diamantina, who was interrogated at great length by the Inquisition in 1603. Many of the details of Romagnole witchcraft or
stregoneria
, including the
Gevol int la carafa
and the use of a textbook as a “book of spells” to impress illiterate clients, are derived from the transcripts of
this and other contemporaneous witch trials in the Romagna. The use of narcotic ointments to induce the witches’ “night flight” or “goat ride” is referred to in numerous Renaissance-era sources—among them Giovanni Battista Porta’s
Natural Magic
—along with specific formulas and detailed descriptions of the resulting hallucinations and motor impairment.

Valentino’s character remains as enigmatic and challenging for the novelist as it was for his contemporaries, who had great difficulty reconciling his messianic leadership qualities with the sinister rumors of his private life. Crimes against women or lower-status men were seldom remarked upon by sixteenth-century observers, so we are mostly informed of Valentino’s prominent male victims. Beginning with the death of his brother in 1497, he embarked on a personal killing spree that included at least a half-dozen other high-profile victims whose elaborately plotted murders far exceeded any practical necessity or political utility. Valentino enjoyed playing cat and mouse with his victims, sometimes sending them on carefully contrived errands or seeing that they were warned that their arrest was imminent, then waiting weeks or months before finally springing his trap. From the accounts we have of various executions, he preferred to visit the condemned for a valedictory interrogation, then withdraw to a concealed place and watch while Michelotto administered the garrote.

But in Valentino’s case, female victims were also noted. He was widely believed to have kidnapped and raped two women of high social standing, crimes of which he was almost certainly guilty. The story that forty young women captured at Capua (where six thousand men, women, and children were massacred by Valentino’s troops) were sent to Rome for his “pleasure” circulated throughout Europe; most subsequent historians have accepted these reports as at least plausible. The murders of the
streghe
in the Romagna are hardly the type of offense history would remember, but they are composited from characteristics of Cesare Borgia’s documented crimes: a predilection for voyeurism, torture, dismemberment, sexual sadism, riddles, and geographic game-playing.

So, was the model for Machiavelli’s
The Prince
a real-life, Renaissance-era Hannibal Lecter—an unusually high-functioning
psychopathic serial killer? We will never have a definitive diagnosis of a man who died centuries before such terms entered clinical practice, forensic science, and the culture at large. But the traits that were most noticeable to Valentino’s contemporaries are remarkably consistent with psychopathy as it is broadly understood today: an exceptionally persuasive and manipulative personality that masked an extreme emotional coldness; an absence of empathy and remorse; narcissism; inexplicable risk-taking; grandiose self-importance; a gift for mimicry; a sense of having been slighted in childhood; and in the end, a propensity to blame everyone else.

As today’s mental health professionals continue to debate the symptoms, causes, and even nomenclature of psychopathy (the prosaic “antisocial personality disorder” is often favored by clinicians), the case of the recidivist criminal Jacopo—taken word for word from the renowned Florentine physician Antonio Benivieni’s
The Hidden Causes of Disease
—offers an interesting historical footnote. Benivieni’s belief that Jacopo’s incorrigibility could be explained by a defective region of the brain he called “the seat of memory” is eerily echoed by recent research: psychopathy has been linked to deficiencies in an almond-size neural bundle known as the amygdala, which plays a key role in both fear responses and our memory of emotional events.

Regardless of Valentino’s clinical condition, the most trenchant insight into his character is provided by the two men with whom he is inextricably linked in history: his father and patron, Pope Alexander VI, and the author of his immortality, Niccolò Machiavelli—both of whom regarded him with extraordinary wariness. Few decisions in history are more baffling than Pope Alexander’s choice of Valentino’s younger brother, the hapless Juan of Gandia, as the instrument of his prodigious worldly ambitions, while keeping one of history’s most gifted and capable natural leaders sidelined as an inconsequential cardinal. Pope Alexander was far too shrewd a judge of men to have overlooked Valentino’s exceptional abilities, without some profound fear—as was rumored among his contemporaries—of his eldest son’s true nature.