The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (8 page)

When Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere ascended the papal throne in November
1503
, he performed the same ritual every pontiff before him had done; he took a new name. No pope’s name was a neutral choice, but Giuliano’s selection of Giulio, or Julius, was ripe with symbolism. Officially, he chose the name in honour of a predecessor, the fourth-century Pope Julius I. Julius II, a Franciscan as his uncle Sixtus had been, was devoted to the cult of Mary: Julius I had erected the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, close to the district the Ligurians in Rome called home. The name Julius was also unusually close to his baptismal one, as if the former cardinal was reluctant to relinquish entirely his previous identity, and wanted his old self to enjoy this most exalted of ecclesiastical positions. Moreover, the name of Julius also had an association with Julius Caesar, whose endeavours had first made Rome great. The city of Genoa even greeted Julius’s election with a eulogy praising him as being endowed with ‘the soul of a Caesar’, a seemingly strange analogy for a churchman.
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Like his namesake, Julius II wanted to be a great statesman, a great builder and a great soldier. He was determined to carry on the work launched by his fifteenth-century predecessors of beautifying both the Vatican Palace complex and the city of Rome. Florence, steered by the Medici family, obsessed equally by art and power, was acknowledged as the great Renaissance city of the fifteenth century. Julius’s mission was to ensure that in the sixteenth that title belonged to Rome and that he would be fêted for eternity as the engineer of the new magnificence of the
caput mundi
. Beyond the city walls, Julius wanted to consolidate the papal states, to see cities such as Bologna returned to their rightful owner, the papacy, and he was prepared to go to war in person to claim his prizes. Everything he did throughout his entire reign was tempered by this Caesarian spirit of bellicose aggression. He was not called the Warrior Pope for nothing. Julius’s years in exile had given greater focus to his dreams and ambitions. They made the taste of his papal victory all the sweeter and made him all the more determined to create a personal identity and legacy that would surpass that of any previous pontiff – including that of the very first. In his satire,
Julius Exclusus
, Erasmus writes of Julius arriving at the gates of heaven and informing Peter, bewildered and scandalized by his successor’s attachment to worldly goods, ‘You are still dreaming of that old Church, in which you and a few starveling bishops ran a really frigid pontificate, subject to poverty, sweat, dangers and a thousand nuisances. Time has changed everything for the better. The Roman pope is now quite a different thing; you were pope in name and title only. If you could see today so many sacred buildings erected by kingly wealth, so many thousands of priests everywhere (many of them rich), so many bishops equal to the greatest kings in military power...so many cardinals dressed in purple with regiments of servants crowding round them...what would you say?’ Peter’s response is, ‘That I was looking at a tyrant worse than worldly, an enemy of the Christ, the bane of the Church.’
6

Very soon after his election, Julius, this ‘bane of the church’ became known as ‘Il papa terribile’. His monstrous temper was quick to flare if his demands and desires were not met. Approaching sixty, Julius knew he had no time to waste if he was to achieve everything he wanted in the time left to him. He personified
terribilità
, the ability to inspire awe-struck terror in those who served him. Giorgio Vasari later praised the portrait that Raphael painted of the Pope towards the end of his life as ‘so wonderfully life-like and true that it inspired fear as if it were alive’.
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Raphael captured the Pope’s brooding gaze, averted from the self-avowedly unworthy and timorous viewer, and his be-ringed, white, claw-like hand as it gripped his chair. It is an image very different from the fresco of the della Rovere men Melozzo da Forlì had painted more than thirty years earlier. Then Pope Julius was still Cardinal Giuliano, Sixtus IV’s less favoured
nipote
, obliged to bend to listen attentively to his uncle’s instructions.

Julius was not the only della Rovere family member whose personality was shaped by enforced absence from Rome. Up in Savona, twenty-yearold Felice della Rovere greeted the news of her father’s election with a mixture of relief and elation tempered by caution. Relief, because it meant that her own years of exile were over; she could now go home to the city of her birth and see her family again. She knew, moreover, that her father’s new-found glory would also have its impact on her own life. There were plenty of cardinals’ daughters, but Felice was now unique; she was the living pope’s only daughter. Such status confirmed her sense of her worth and rarity, and she knew that the possibility of being something exceptional was within her grasp. Yet she also recognized that such ambitions might not necessarily be reached without a struggle. She had resisted, successfully, her father’s attempts to marry her off while he was still a cardinal. But such resistance in those turbulent times, with her father constantly distracted and often far away in France, was relatively easy for a headstrong girl fixed on self-governance. Felice knew the stakes were much higher now. For her father, Felice was a valuable asset. He could use her to seal any number of political deals through a marriage alliance, and he might not consider his daughter’s personal wishes unless she voiced them forcibly. In such papal strategies Felice della Rovere did not want to be a pawn; she wanted to be a queen. She was more than prepared to enter into a battle of wills with her father in order to achieve her ends.

chapter 2

The Reluctant Bride

Cardinal Giuliano’s coronation as Pope Julius II took place on
28
November
1503
. The new pope spent between fifty and sixty thousand ducats on this lavish affair, which was marred by rain.
¹
There is no indication that he invited his daughter to travel from Savona for this momentous day in his life. This was typical of his attitude towards her throughout the course of his papal career. Felice was to appear at the Vatican Palace only when Julius needed her, although he was to come to need her more often than he might initially have thought. It was not necessarily that Julius was mean-spirited. The relationship between father and daughter defies easy categorization, but Julius certainly valued her. He was, however, guided by certain rules and, as pontiff, he did not want to flaunt his illegitimate daughter. Julius was partly influenced by his own sense of what was decorous and appropriate behaviour in his position. In comparison with his predecessors, his uncle Sixtus included, Julius was markedly restrained in distributing largesse to members of his family. But his treatment of Felice was also predicated on his desire for his reign to be seen as the polar opposite of Alexander VI’s. Julius’s loathing of Alexander was so great that he even hated living in the same Vatican apartments as his predecessor had done. Alexander had certainly taken nepotism to levels even the indulgent Sixtus IV could not have imagined.

Yet Julius could appreciate the reasoning behind Alexander’s bestowal of cardinals’ hats on his sons, and his making his favourite, Cesare, lord of the provinces of the Romagna. Even the multiple marriages Alexander organized for his daughter Lucrezia were a comprehensible component of the family advancement that had become the norm for papal policy. Where Alexander had gone too far was in his overtly public love for his daughter. As his popularity with the city of Rome waned, there was speculation that yet another Borgia bastard was in fact the product of an incestuous relationship between Alexander and Lucrezia.
²
Julius could not remove from his mind the idea that should Felice, his unmarried daughter, be present at his crowning, the same rumours and whispers would begin about their relationship.

Despite her absence from the coronation, Felice was clearly on Julius’s mind during its aftermath. The first surviving written reference to Felice della Rovere dates from January
1504
and is embedded in the dense multi-volumed chronicles of the political life of Italy compiled by the Venetian Marino Sanuto. It reads, somewhat tersely, ‘The Pope is arranging a wedding for his only daughter Felice who is in Savona and is awaited in Rome, to the Signor of Piombino, Lord Appiano.’
3
Felice still had more than a month to prepare herself for her return to Rome. At the end of February, there was further news of her travel plans: ‘Madama Felice, the daughter of the Pope, is coming from Savona, and the Pope has sent some of the galleons that are at Ostia to honour her. Also this week the prefects and the Cardinal of San Pietro in Vincoli will come, and he will do them great honour.’
4
This brief description of Julius’s different modes of honouring his visiting relatives is telling. In Renaissance Rome, how, when and where the pope’s visitors – friends, family or political emissaries – were greeted was an indication of the esteem in which they were held.
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The implications of such social manoeuvring were thus telegraphed to the visitors themselves and to the wider diplomatic world. The prefects of Rome were Julius’s brother Giovanni della Rovere, Lord of Senigallia, and his wife, the sister of the Duke of Urbino, Giovanna da Montefeltro; the title was purely honorary. The cardinal was Julius’s favourite nephew, Galeotto Franciotto della Rovere, who had inherited his uncle’s old titular Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli. These distinguished family members were to be welcomed with an event in the city of Rome itself, something, the missive

implied, of a spectacular nature. On the other hand, Julius sent his daughter a welcoming committee to meet her at sea, before she even landed on
terra firma
. Such a reception met several of her father’s requirements for Felice’s entrance into Rome. It acknowledged his daughter’s arrival in an impressive and not inexpensive fashion. The launching of galleons at full sail was a costly enterprise. In fact, the further out a papal retinue travelled from Rome to meet an incoming guest, the greater the perceived prestige bestowed by the pope on the visitor. Felice could not feel that her father had not made some effort to honour her arrival. Perhaps more to the point, from Julius’s perspective, those with an interest in her presence in Rome, such as the Lord of Piombino, would note her father’s acknowledgement of her. Felice’s stock on the marriage market would depreciate if it was perceived that she was of apparently little worth to her father. At the same time, however, this meeting at sea was, by dint of its location, discreet. It meant that Julius did not have to arrange a public ceremony in Rome to honour his daughter. At sea, apart from his sailors and an unnamed Vatican emissary, there would be no onlookers, no audience to witness her arrival, as there would have been in the city itself. Such an ostentatious event, Julius felt, could have compromised his own position as supreme pontiff, given that he was determined to be seen as very different from his predecessor, at least in the eyes of the plebeian faithful.

Felice’s return to Rome meant a return to her childhood home. Decorum did not permit the young widow to stay at the Vatican Palace, but the Palazzo de Cupis was waiting for her. Her family was there – Lucrezia, Bernardino, Francesca and Gian Domenico – all delighted to see their cherished girl transformed into a young woman. Life in the Piazza Navona had undergone few changes in her absence, but the de Cupis, like Felice, were well aware of the impact Julius’s election could have on their future. They could not have imagined that the cardinal’s daughter would return as the daughter of a pope and that in due course they would profit from the family connection. In
1506
Julius made Bernardino Treasurer of Perugia and Umbria. On the death of Girolamo Basso della Rovere in
1507
, Bernardino’s brother Teseo received the bishoprics of Recanati and Macerata which had been held by Girolamo.
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For Felice, there could be no better base than the Palazzo de Cupis. Her stepfather was
conclavisto
, the keeper of the key in more than name: any information passing through the Vatican would be diverted sooner or later into the de Cupis home. If she were to agree to marry him, Felice wanted a lot of information about the Lord of Piombino.

The Lord of Piombino, Jacopo Appiano, had been a victim of Borgia aggression and had only recently had his lands returned to him by Julius. Piombino was relatively small, but its geographical location was not without its usefulness to a Ligurian pope and his family. The city was a port some seventy kilometres to the south of Livorno and was important in terms of both trade and defence along that stretch of the Tyrrhenian coast. Julius’s own coastal upbringing made him unusually conscious for a pope of the strategic value of port towns from both a financial and a defensive point of view. At the port situated at the mouth of the river Tiber, which connected Rome to the sea, he maintained a large fleet of ships, including those sent out to greet Felice. Later, in
1508
, he would add a large fortress, designed by Donato Bramante, to the port of Civitavecchia, about a hundred kilometres to the south of Piombino. Bringing Piombino into the family fold would make a significant nautical contribution to della Rovere control of the coastline between Rome and Savona.

Furthermore, Jacopo Appiano brought a number of advantageous political alliances to the marriage table. He was on good terms with Florence, Pisa and Siena and his family also had a long-standing alliance with the Kingdom of Naples. Via the Lord of Piombino, Julius could add the Appiano allies – the most important Tuscan towns and Naples – to his own.
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With his strategically positioned city and the right sort of friends, Jacopo Appiano had attractive qualities as a bridegroom, at least from Julius’s perspective.