The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (6 page)

chapter 7

Enter the Borgia

The year
1492
was to be the year of the Spanish. It was Christopher Columbus of Genoa who discovered the New World but he claimed it in the name of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. And the new pope, who took the name Alexander VI, elected on
11
August
1492
, was Rodrigo Borgia, a native of Jativa near Valencia in Spain. Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII had been nepotistic popes, but Rodrigo would redefine nepotism. He ascended the papal throne as the father of at least eight children by at least two women; while he was pope he would father perhaps more, by his mistress Giulia Farnese. Giulia might have replaced Vanozza Catanei in Alexander’s affections but his children by Vanozza – Juan, Joffre, Lucrezia and Cesare – were never superseded. Alexander immediately began planning splendid marriages for the first three and made Cesare a cardinal. By
1498
, however, Cesare had abandoned his ecclesiastical position and the following year married the sister of the King of Navarre, adopting grandiose secular ambitions.
¹

Alexander was an excellent administrator and did much to centralize and secure papal power. But these achievements will always be overshadowed by his ultimately thwarted ambition to forge a dynasty out of the Borgia, a family whose origins were at least as humble as those of the della Rovere. Most important for Felice’s story is the way the Spanish pope treated his daughter. Lucrezia Borgia, roughly three years older than Felice, has been the subject of perhaps a hundred biographies, fictional, non-fictional and somewhere in between. Perception of her has been coloured by unfounded tales of her murdering her second husband, who actually died at the hands of her brother Cesare. In truth, it is hard to get a sense of her personality. She begins life as a pleasure-loving young girl and ends it as a pious Duchess of Ferrara, spending long periods of time in seclusion in convents.

Alexander loved his daughter extravagantly and his treatment of Lucrezia scandalized the city of Rome. In June
1493
her marriage to the Count of Pesaro was celebrated in the Sala Regia, the papal throne room at the Vatican Palace, with Lucrezia attended by a hundred and fifty Roman noblewomen. The marriage was dissolved in
1497
to make way for a more politically useful union with the southern Duke of Bisceglie. He in turn was murdered and Lucrezia’s third husband was Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara, who ranked among the first families of northern Italy.

In the years following her father’s election, Lucrezia was a regular presence at the Vatican court. On at least one occasion her father left her as his deputy during his absence from the palace, although her power was purely nominal. But certainly women were a constant presence at the court of the Borgia. Alexander regularly hosted events at the palace where the entertainment was provided by courtesans. At a ceremony in the basilica of St Peter’s Lucrezia and her outrageous Neapolitan sister-inlaw, the illegitimate Sancia of Aragon, scandalized the College of Cardinals by sitting in seats strictly reserved for canons of the church, an act sanctioned by Lucrezia’s father. An air of sexual anarchy pervaded the Vatican of the
1490
s and it infected Lucrezia. In August
1498
, a Bolognese correspondent wrote, ‘Perotto, the first
cameriere
[chamberlain] of Our Lord [Alexander], who was no longer to be found, I now understand to be in prison for having made His Holiness’s daughter pregnant.’
²
Perotto was subsequently found dead in the Tiber, bound hand and foot, and Lucrezia gave birth to a child who then disappears from history.

The
1490
s were a time of Vatican court state ceremonies, lavish entertainments and romantic trysts. As Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of one former cardinal, played at the Vatican court, her father was forcing another cardinal’s daughter out of the only home she had ever known.

chapter 8

Felice’s Departure

For Giuliano della Rovere, of all the cardinals to be elected successor to Innocent VIII, there could have been no worse a choice than Rodrigo Borgia. For some time there had been friction between Giuliano and Rodrigo, himself the nephew of a former pope, Calixtus III. Rodrigo had endorsed Innocent VIII in conclave and raised support for him but felt the Pope had given him little reward for his efforts. He and Giuliano had quarrelled at Innocent’s deathbed, when Giuliano had defended the Pope’s right to distribute papal money to members of his own family, an act Rodrigo had protested against. Given that, as pope, Rodrigo would take benefiting his own family to an entirely new level, there is certain irony to be derived from such objection. Before the conclave began, Rodrigo embarked on a breathtakingly comprehensive plan of bribery to purchase the cardinals’ votes. He promised Cardinal Sforza the office of vice chancellor, to the Roman cardinals Orsini, Colonna and Savelli, he offered fortified towns or abbeys with large holdings in the Roman
campagna
. Rodrigo even included della Rovere relatives in his scheme, promising benefices to Raffaele Riario and a Benedictine abbey in Turin to a cousin from Savoy, Domenico della Rovere. But he knew he could not buy Giuliano della Rovere’s vote, nor that of Girolamo Basso della Rovere, who were united against Rodrigo by their own particular sense of family. However, their alliance was insufficient to withstand the overwhelming wave of Rodrigo’s supporters, all eager to collect their rewards to supplement their already lavish lifestyles. Infessura noted sarcastically, ‘As soon as [Alexander] became pope, he dispersed his property to the paupers.’
1
Giuliano was not alone in his reservations about Alexander.

The Borgia Pope planned to play on a much larger political stage than his predecessors had done. Like Sixtus, he made his family’s advancement a primary goal but Alexander had much greater ambitions, aiming to secure not just cardinals’ hats but dukedoms for his sons. And as a Spaniard, it was Spanish interests he promoted. Consequently, he made other European rulers, such as the Duke of Milan and the King of France, very uneasy. Seeking a cardinal who might stand with them against Alexander, a Milanese envoy wrote to his lord, ‘If Cardinal Giuliano can be got to ally himself with France, a tremendous weapon will have been forged against the Pope.’
²
Giuliano was willing to turn himself into such a weapon. The position he had held when Innocent was pope had given him the opportunity to wield political influence and indulge in statesmanship in a way he had never experienced during his uncle’s reign. He had no desire to return to a life where he existed only on the periphery of power. But such a decision was not without consequence. To take a public stance in Rome, with the intent of overthrowing the incumbent pope, posed a threat to his very life. Alexander’s ambition outstripped that of his predecessors, and so did his ferocity; he would not hesitate to have Giuliano assassinated. On
24
April
1494
, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere set sail, under cover of darkness, from the port of Rome at Ostia, a bishopric he had once held. He stopped briefly in his home territory of Genoa and Savona, and from there he made his way to France. He would not see Rome again for almost a decade. His principal mission now was to advise Charles VIII, King of France, on the best ways to attack Alexander in Italy.
³
However, it was not simply a matter of Rome now being too dangerous for Giuliano. Felice, too, was at risk. Many parents valued their children for what they might bring to the family in later life, in the form of a spouse or a position of influence. But for those in a politically volatile state, children could be a weak point, a means by which a parent could be controlled. Giuliano understood very well the potential of this kind of threat. Some

years later he had the young Ferrante Gonzaga held as hostage at the Vatican court in return for his father’s, the Marquis of Mantua’s, loyalty to the papacy. This kind of hostage-taking had a long history, dating back to the ancient world. Giuliano might have been a somewhat distant father to Felice, but he knew that Alexander would not hesitate to seize her if he felt that he could then force her father’s hand. It would not be safe for Felice della Rovere to stay in Rome any longer.

The assertion that this is what happened to Felice is based on a combination of speculation and available historical material. It is evident that Felice did spend her earliest years with her mother and the de Cupis family because of her closeness to them later on, not to mention her almost instinctive understanding of how Rome worked. Yet, in
1504
, contemporary accounts describe her as ‘Madonna Felice da Savona’ implying that the della Rovere home town was now her place of residence.

Felice was taken from the de Cupis palace, from the home of her mother and stepfather, brothers and sisters. She knew that, like other girls, at the age of fifteen or sixteen she would have left home to be married. But she was little more than eleven, young to be leaving the only home she had ever known. Moreover, even on her marriage, she might not have expected that she would have to leave her city, because it was very likely that her husband would have been a Roman. She could never have imagined that she would have to leave, by boat, for her father’s native city of Savona, to be placed in the care of her della Rovere relatives.

As a young girl living in the centre of Rome, Felice had had little opportunity or need to travel very far. It is probable that the longest journey she had ever taken was to cross the Tiber river to visit St Peter’s or her mother’s family in Trastevere. Now she boarded a boat, a mode of transportation that was completely alien to her, to undertake the five-hundred-kilometre journey north along the Tyrrhenian coastline. Nor were sixteenth-century ships remotely comfortable; their decks sloped, making moving around challenging for the uninitiated.
⁴
The voyage can have served only to heighten Felice’s fear and growing indignation.

That Felice was well aware that it was the Borgia who were driving her out of her native city is indicated by a story she would tell a little later in life. While at sea, she believed a Borgia ship was chasing her boat and she vowed that she would throw herself into the water rather than be taken by its sailors. Her father’s enemy became her own. In fact she had her own personal grievance against them: they had taken her from her family. Awaiting her in Savona might be her blood kin, but Felice della Rovere, despite her name, was a daughter of Rome not of Savona.

chapter 9

The Adolescent Felice

Savona was very different from Rome, not simply in terms of its size and history, but also in its social structure. Unlike Rome, Savona was not a city that fed off the Church, populated by bureaucrats, and where a cardinal’s daughter, living in their midst, was revered as something special. Instead Savona was a small harbour town, whose important men were its merchants.
¹
In Rome, the della Rovere cousins Felice knew, such as her cousin Girolamo Basso, were churchmen. Now she was to encounter secular relations such as her aunt Luchina, Giuliano’s sister, and her cousin Lucrezia, who was almost the same age as her. If Giuliano had given any thought to the matter at all, he might perhaps have expected Luchina to become a second mother to Felice and Lucrezia a new sister.

But the absence of any contact between Felice and Luchina and Lucrezia once Felice was an adult suggests that their relationship did not develop along these lines. It is not hard to imagine the young Felice, on the cusp of adolescence, arriving in Savona unhappy at having been taken from the only family she knew and with preconceived ideas about herself. Felice felt no stigma from her illegitimacy. She was proud of her parentage because those around her were proud of it on her behalf. Her Savona cousins, however, who might have profited from the Church but whose lives did not revolve around it, probably did not see Felice in the way she saw herself.