The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (92 page)

“And in what cause, sir, am I expected to contribute one hundred thousand ducats?” Isabella inquires icily.

“For your ransom, señora,” the Spaniard replies, equally frigid but with a smile. “Roma is a captive city. You and your” — he waves his arm in a great arc to indicate the numerous guests she has taken in — “friends are the spoils of war.”

Whatever treatment she may have expected from her rescuers, this is not it. “Ferrante! Do you hear this fellow?” she demands of her fidgeting and uncomfortable son.

“I do, Madonna Madre.” All the courage he displayed this day at the barricades dissolves at the sight of her anger.

“Then why do you not remind him that he is here as the representative of my dead nephew, cut down in his cause this very day and leaving him with orders to protect me?”

“We will protect you, señora,” the Spaniard cuts in smoothly, “but for a price.”

This Spaniard is not making Ferrante’s task easier. But the young man gamely takes up the challenge of explaining to his outraged mother why it is necessary for her to pay ransom to her own son.

“It is the men, the soldiers, Madonna Madre,” he stammers, every minute more the erring boy and less the cool captain. “They have followed us here with the expectation that we will assess the ransoms available in this palace and exact them. If they do not get what they feel is coming to them, they will sack and burn this place as they are doing at this moment all over the city.”

“You have that little control over them?” she asks.

He nods, silent and ashamed.

“If what you say is true, if these barbarians really do answer to no one or nothing but their own bestiality, then I thank God my poor dead nephew did not live to see this day,” is his mother’s impassioned reply. But the Spaniard will have no traffic with rhetoric.

“It was your poor dead nephew, señora, who drove these men on with the promise that they would collect their pay, now owing to them for more than six months of hunger and cold and betrayal — that they would collect all that was owed them and more when they reached Roma. Constable Bourbon gave them Roma, señora, Roma with all of its treasures. Unfortunately, you are one of those treasures.”

“I fear, Madonna Madre, that your generosity has proven your undoing.” Her son takes up the argument. “It is reported in the camp that more than two millions in valuables are concealed in this palace. Your hospitality has made you not only a prize but a glittering prize. Believe me, madonna, ransom is far preferable to a sack of the palace. Let each of your guests pay what they are assessed, and out of the money collected we will engage a cadre of stout and loyal men to stand guard over you. And when the violence ends three days from now, those
bravi
will accompany you out of this city to the sea and safety.”

It is scandalous, of course. Unconscionable and wickedly opportunistic. Isabella plays her outrage to the hilt. Again and again she turns to her son, at times imploring, at others demanding. But her game is up and she knows it. By dawn, it is tacitly agreed that ransoms will be paid.

A table is set up in a vault behind the kitchens, covered with green baize and equipped with a small weighing scale. Seeing it, Grazia is reminded of the table she sat behind in her father’s
banco
. The difference is that here the
banchieri
are two high-ranking officers in the Imperial army and one dowager marchesana.

Now a long line of clients forms outside this bizarre
banco
to make their offerings to the unlikely
banchieri
. Isabella fights the Spaniard on every case. She wins some small victories but for the most part her guests must pay with every ducat they can raise, every jewel, and indeed every valuable thing they own. For some an armed escort is provided so that the client can retrieve assets he or she has hidden away and bring them back safely to the palace.

By the end of the first day so much treasure has piled up that the assessors, threatened with suffocation in the packed vault, are forced to move to larger quarters. There the assessing goes on as before, slow, methodical, tedious — in striking contrast to the scenes in the streets outside, which by now have begun quite literally to run red with blood.

The three allowable “days of violence” come and go, but there is no cessation to the savagery. In vain the Prince of Orange, who has fallen into leadership of the unruly force by default, sends his heralds through the streets to announce the end of the sack. He might as well have blown his trumpets into deaf ears. The landsknechts continue to kill every priest or nun they lay their hands on and to loot every church, convent, and monastery.

In the whole city there appears to be not a single person who does not have to purchase his safety, babies and infants excepted because, whenever found, they are simply tossed out of high windows to splatter on the street below in view of their horrified mothers. Whereupon the mothers themselves are forced to copulate with pigs — a favorite entertainment of the Germans — or are driven through the sewers naked to forage for treasure that the crafty Romans are reputed to have buried in human excrement — a favored diversion of the more gold-oriented Spaniards.

These are the scenes that greet the eyes of Captain Ferrante Gonzaga as he rides dutifully across Roma every morning to play his role of
banchiere
to his mother’s guests and incidentally to beg her to let him spirit her away to a safe place outside the city. But Isabella remains firm. She will not leave the palace until every soul she had taken under her protection is released at a place beyond the walls where they will have a reasonable hope of safety.

“I have promised these people my protection,” she reminds him. “You know, my son,” she chides gently, “men are not the only creatures who hold their honor more closely than their lives. We women too are jealous of our word.”

Not for the first time Ferrante wishes that he had not been blessed with the
prima donna del mondo
as his mother.

For her own part, Isabella confides in Grazia, she would gladly have run into the arms of the devil if he offered to lead her out of this hell. But honor holds her at the bargaining table trading lives for gems and ducats. She spends her evenings with Grazia who, to keep her own sanity, has begun to lead her son on a voyage along Herodotus’s winding paths.

To the two women and the boy the Room of the Fishes has become a sanctuary of learning where they can wrap themselves in the cocoon of the past and there find peace and comfort.

“I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my history,” Grazia hears with pleasure the still-reedy voice of her son translating from the ancient tongue. “So that the great deeds of men may not be forgotten, whether they be Greeks or foreigners and especially to show the causes of war between them . . .”

As Madonna Isabella never tires of pointing out, no one who collects books and reads them is ever totally bereft of comfort.

62

M
ay 10, 1527

The last prayer offered in the Sistine Chapel before the Imperials entered Roma on the seventh day of May was a plea to God to save His city, offered by a pope with tears running down his cheeks. Since that day, the strains of Kyrie and Agnus Dei have given place to the dissonant neighing of the Prince of Orange’s horse. The Prince has chosen to stable his horse in the chapel next to his new headquarters in the Pope’s private apartments in order to prevent the animal from being stolen. There it stands tethered at the foot of Perugino’s ideal city, gazing up at Michelangelo’s Adam, the first man, at the moment of his release from the hands of God.

The Prince of Orange is impressed by the Sistine ceiling. He gives it his undivided attention for at least two minutes each day when he comes to the chapel to visit his horse. These visits aside, no one else has shown the slightest interest in Michelangelo Buonarroti’s vision of the Creation. After all, there are no jewels embedded in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Its frescoes cannot be scraped off and sold. A single horse gives sufficient protection to this treasure.

But wait. What of the ten panels that hang below it — those elegant tapestries designed by Raffaello, worked in Brussels by Pieter Van Aelst and valued above all his other possessions by Leo X, the Medici connoisseur? In the present climate the perfection of their design, the beauty of their colors, their meticulous workmanship, count for little. But the gold and silver threads worked into the weave are another story. Tapestries have been burned before now to salvage the precious metal of their threads. These tapestries are at risk.

Harried though she is by her Spanish captor, the Dowager Marchesana of Mantova cannot get the thought of Raffaello’s tapestries out of her mind. The negotiations at the green baize table are winding down. The last of the refugee women under her roof will be conducted to the Nomentana gate the next day. Then, finally, her honor will permit her to leave Roma. Her position as mother and aunt of two of the city’s conquerors has wrung at least one concession from the rapacious Cordova. She and the members of her household will be escorted out of Roma unransomed, their possessions guarded by a special contingent of
bravi
handpicked by the Prince of Orange.

Again and again the lady’s thoughts return to the tapestries. How easy it would be to pack them in boxes and send them to Mantova along with her own possessions. As she puts it to herself, God has given her the opportunity to rescue the tapestries from certain destruction. They will be safe in her baggage train, guarded by the barbarians themselves. And in time, when Roma once more becomes a secure depository, they will of course be returned to the Pope. But for a time — who knows how long? — the tapestries will be hers.

It is in order to discuss the matter of the Raffaello tapestries that Ferrante Gonzaga pays a visit to his commander, the Prince of Orange, in his billet — Raffaello’s
stanze
, the apartments known to the world by the name of the genius whose frescoes adorn the walls. There, enthroned in the Pope’s audience room, the fair-haired young commander of the Emperor’s army finds himself quite at home in the company of the great minds of the ages assembled by Raffaello to populate his “School of Athens.”

Captain Ferrante Gonzaga is a welcome guest here. By virtue of the levelheadedness and courage he displayed at San Spirito, the twenty-year-old has earned himself a place in the Prince’s inner circle and a seat on the Council of Ten appointed by Orange to rule the city. Once he has apprised his commander of his celebrated mother’s wish to rescue the panels in the chapel, Orange is happy to oblige. But alerted now to their value, he decides to set aside a few for himself.

“Refresh my memory. How many of these panels are there?” he asks.

“Ten in all.” This is a detail Ferrante came by only yesterday. In fact, until his mother brought up the subject, he had not even been aware that there were any tapestries from the hand of the master. Had he been trained at an Italian court, he would have had implanted in his mind a complete inventory of all the great treasures in the peninsula together with their location and approximate value. Since the time of the first Sforzas, Estes, and Montefeltros, an Italian
condottiero
has been expected to master not only the martial arts but the fine arts and the humanities as well. However, Ferrante Gonzaga was torn from his roots at a young age and sent to Madrid to learn chivalry at the Emperor’s court. Like Orange, he is the product of the Habsburg code. Honor, courage, and skill with the sword are the virtues prized among the Spaniards and the ultramontanes. In Spain and Germany it is no disgrace for a knight to be clumsy at the galliard. And singing, lute playing, and quoting Virgil are best left to priests and women.

So these two young men, hardly more aware than the common soldiers they command of the inestimable value of their booty, set about quite casually to divide the spoils: two panels for Isabella; three for Orange himself; and five for the pleasure of his Majesty, Charles V.

That night after dark the two tapestries assigned to Madonna Isabella are hauled up by rope into the Colonna Palace. They have been packed as carelessly as if they were bales of hay; in fact, some of the hay that lay on the floor of the chapel still clings to the gold and silver threads. But no manure. Madonna Isabella thanks God for small mercies.

She cannot wait until daylight to see them. A porter is called, and with his help and that of Costanza, the chandelier is pulled down and all of its candles lit to illuminate the first panel to be rolled out onto the marble floor: Saint Paul preaching at Athens.

Isabella’s eyes devour the deep red and gold folds of the saint’s cloak with the voracious hunger of a predator. To her, every detail is a separate dish to be tasted and savored. But it is a lonely feast.

Many of those incarcerated with her in the palace are sufficiently cultivated to recognize the magnificence spread out on the marble floor of the salon, but not, she fears, sufficiently scrupulous to be entrusted with such a secret. There is only one person in her entourage both cultivated and trustworthy enough to share the moment. “Call Madonna Grazia,” she orders.