The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (2 page)

A woman whose presence can resonate in such a way through the modern city, who has her tale to tell, was clearly a ‘somebody’ in her own day. That is a rare feat when one remembers that Felice lived half a millennium ago, at a time when a woman who achieved any kind of distinction was the exception, not the rule. Her status as a pope’s daughter immediately imbues her with the frisson of scandal and an attendant sense of intrigue. However, the source of this fascination goes beyond the fact she was the daughter of a catholic priest. Felice della Rovere is a complicated and complex woman, both bound and buttressed by the circumstances of her birth. Her tale is a story of personal achievement, one in which she strived to scale the ladders of ambition, who crept along and then sailed down the corridors of power. How far she was able to go, those who facilitated her climb, those she knocked out of her way and those to whom she extended a helping hand are all a part of her tale. Hers is also a story of sacrifice; ambition is rarely achieved without cost.

Felice’s father was a cardinal at the time of her birth. There was no expectation that Giuliano della Rovere, as he was born, would become Pope Julius II in
1503
. He was only one of a number of cardinals, and by no means the most important person in Rome. Any children he might have had were of little significance to the wider world. Consequently, his daughter has a ghost-like existence until Giuliano becomes pope, when Felice was about twenty years old. From the available material, I have re-created those early years out of a combination of speculation and inference, set within the social and political history of the time. The Felice you see unfold in these pages is fashioned from chronicles, correspondence and diaries, account books and inventories – her own and those of others. Whenever possible, her letters are used to allow her to speak clearly for herself. When they do not survive, I have reconstructed her life, thoughts and ideas from other documents, such as the letters of those who corresponded with her, or who commented and reported on her actions and activities. Bringing Felice to life is like bringing together the components of the
paragone
, the Renaissance debate on which art form – sculpture or painting – is superior. Like a piece of sculpture, she must be seen in the round in order to become a fully three-dimensional character. Like a painting, she needs colour, light and shadow to appear as a vibrant part of this world. But instead of being formed of modelling clay or pigment minerals, she emerges here from a few printed pages, and a collection of almost forgotten and faded sixteenth-century documents.

part i

The Cardinal’s Daughter

chapter 1

Felice’s Father

In the year
1480
, Pope Sixtus IV commissioned the artist Melozzo da Forlì to create a fresco image of himself, his librarian and his nephews in the library he had instituted at the Vatican Palace. The most compelling presence in the picture is the tall cardinal standing in front of his uncle. He possesses great dark eyes, a hawked nose and angular cheekbones. This man is Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. With his red cardinal’s robes and tonsured head, this is very much how he would have looked when he first met Felice’s mother. Before that moment, Cardinal Giuliano had had more than his share of triumphs and disappointments.

Although Giuliano holds a dominant position in this picture, his status in the arena of contemporary Vatican court politics is one of greater complexity. Giuliano della Rovere was born on
15
December, probably in
1445
, in a tiny village called Albissola.
¹
His family home, however, was nearby Savona, a coastal town in the western province of Liguria, some thirty kilometres to the north-west of its more prosperous neighbour, Genoa. Being a Ligurian, a man of the sea, was very much a part of Giuliano’s identity, and he shared his sense of adventure and vision with a fellow Ligurian, Christopher Columbus of Genoa, less than a decade his junior.

But if Columbus’s fortune was made through sea-faring, the della Rovere family fortune was built on the Church. For much of the fifteenth century, the della Rovere were obscure, endowed with neither noble blood nor a history of achievement. Julius’s father, Raffaello, might have been a sailor and his mother, Theodora, possibly Greek. This in itself is unusual. It was rare, and still not the norm in Italy, to marry outside one’s own town, let alone country, and it was certainly an unusual son who was born from this union.

The della Rovere family might have continued to languish in anonymity were it not for Giuliano’s uncle Francesco, who forged a distinguished clerical career for himself.
²
A Franciscan friar, Francesco was a highly effective preacher, and rapidly became a prominent member of the order. By
1462
, he was its General. Five years later, Pope Paul II made him a cardinal. Customarily, every cardinal was given a church and its holdings from which he derived his title, and as Francesco’s titular church the Pope gave him San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. He became the first of several della Rovere cardinals to take possession of this church, whose most precious relic was the chains (
vincoli
) believed to have bound Saint Peter when he was imprisoned in Rome.

The position of cardinal gave Francesco admittance to the College of Cardinals and, with it, the power to help shape the future of the Church. He now had a vote in papal elections and indeed the possibility of becoming pope. In
1471
, following Pope Paul II’s sudden death, Cardinal Francesco della Rovere, only four years after his appointment, emerged as the unexpected favourite at the conclave, the papal election. On
25
August, Francesco della Rovere of Savona was crowned Pope Sixtus IV.

Despite his membership of a mendicant order, with its vows of poverty, Sixtus instituted a nepotistic papacy, placing the advancement of his family above the needs of the Church. He had numerous nephews, many of whom received positions of secular or ecclesiastical importance. Sixtus’ favourite nephews were the sons of his sister Bianca. Pietro was made a cardinal only a few weeks after Sixtus’ election. To keep him company, Sixtus made his cousin, Giuliano, a cardinal as well.

Pietro and Giuliano were already members of the Franciscan order, ordained in their youth, possibly under pressure from their uncle. The cousins, both nearing thirty, were scarcely able to believe their good fortune at making such a rapid advancement from being lowly friars to joining the ranks of the Church’s most powerful men. They were so excited by their new appointments that they disregarded Church decorum and scandalously began wearing their scarlet hats before they were officially elected to the College of Cardinals. ‘It is an unheard of thing to appear in public with the hat before the announcement is yet published,’ the ambassador from Mantua wrote home disapprovingly, stressing what was widely perceived as the
arriviste
nature of the new papal family from a Ligurian backwater.
³

The cousins might have shared a common excitement at their promotion and its attendant benefits, but they were rivals for their uncle’s attention, and his preference became very clear. Pietro Riario spent heavily and was a lavish entertainer. He could be relied on by his uncle to host just the right kind of splendid occasion to impress both visiting dignitaries and Roman citizens. To celebrate St Peter’s feast day in
1473
, Pietro staged ‘a most noble representation of the Tribute that came to the Romans when they ruled the world, and there were sixty mules all harnessed and covered with cloths bearing his coat of arms, and they processed from the Popolo Gate to the Palace of Santi Apostoli [the home Pietro had built for himself]’.
⁴

Pietro was a natural showman in a way that his cousin Giuliano was not, and was seen to be of greater value to Sixtus. Giuliano, as cardinal, had received his uncle’s own former titular church of San Pietro in Vincoli, but he was conscious of being the underdog at the Vatican court, his uncle’s less favoured nephew. But sometimes such treatment hardens and sharpens determination and ambition. Rather than become a jealous, passive martyr as others in his position might have done, or spend time scheming to bring about his cousin’s downfall, Giuliano concentrated instead on honing and improving his own skills and abilities. He had an innate sense of survival, an instinct for management, and a fondness of the military that in later years was to earn him the title of ‘Warrior Pope’. Rather than simply existing on the periphery of the Vatican court, conscious of his second-class status, Giuliano became Sixtus’ troubleshooter. He went out across the Italian papal states, arbitrating in disturbances and insurrections. In June
1474
Giuliano was sent to Todi, a hill town north of Rome whose lord, a
guelph
, and therefore a supporter of the papacy, had been murdered. The province had descended into anarchy. At the head of a troop of soldiers, Giuliano entered the city and succeeded in quelling the disturbances. He had similar success at the Umbrian cities of Spoleto and Città di Castello and began to enjoy his warrior-like image. On Giuliano’s return to Rome from Città di Castello on
9
September
1474
, one observer wrote, ‘All the cardinals had been instructed to go and meet him, but the hardy Ligurian was too early for them. Before the sun had risen he was at the church of Santa Maria del Popolo [sponsored by the della Rovere family].’
⁵

Giuliano’s successes prompted Sixtus to send him even further afield. In February of
1476
Sixtus made him Archbishop of Avignon in France. Because of tensions between France and Rome, Giuliano travelled there a month later to provide a strong ecclesiastical presence in the country. He stayed over a year. During that time he forged good relations with the French crown and with important French prelates.

Pietro Riario died in
1477
, and Giuliano was left as the only della Rovere cardinal. Giuliano was confident he would grow in favour with his uncle. But his return to Rome at the end of
1477
revealed to Giuliano that, despite his hard work, Sixtus was still not going to make him his right-hand man. Giuliano’s power was further diluted when, in December
1477
, Sixtus created seven more della Rovere nephews and cousins cardinals, including his great nephew, the sixteen-year-old Raffaello Riario, who soon became his uncle’s obvious favourite.

In June
1479
Giuliano chose to go back to Avignon, where he was welcomed warmly, and where he felt his position and influence were more clearly appreciated. This time, his absence from Rome was to last three years.
⁶
It was an important period in the life of the man who would come to refashion Rome. The Palais des Papes at Avignon, the residence of the popes during their exile from Rome in the fourteenth century, was at this time a much more splendid establishment than the Vatican Palace. The Italian cardinal was impressed by the Avignon palace’s splendid stairways, dining rooms and audience halls, exquisite decoration and wall hangings. For the first time in his life, Giuliano, the former mendicant friar, became a patron of architecture, renovating the bishop’s palace at Avignon with fashionable new windows. The underdog cardinal could feel the thrill of putting his own stamp on a building.

For the rest of his life, Giuliano della Rovere, like no other cleric before or after him, set about establishing his identity through highly decorated architectural works of art. He understood completely the rationale of the fifteenth-century Florentine nobleman Giovanni Rucellai, who noted in his diary that when it came to leaving a legacy, constructing buildings was at least as important as fathering children.

Fathering children, or rather the act required to achieve it, probably interested Giuliano less than it did many of his ecclesiastical counterparts. In
1517
, four years after Giuliano’s death, the northern humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, a long-standing critic of the cardinal who became Pope Julius II, published the
Julius Exclusus
, in which he imagines Julius barred from entering paradise. The satirical dialogue is a conversation between Julius and St Peter at the gates of heaven, in which Peter grows increasingly appalled at the worldly nature of what Julius considers his life’s achievements. When Julius mentions his daughter, Peter, incredulous, asks, ‘Do you mean to tell me that popes have wives and daughters?’ Julius replies, ‘Well, they don’t have wives of their own of course. But what’s so strange about their having children, since they’re men, not eunuchs?’
⁷