The Tigress of Forli (31 page)

The only way out of this situation, the prophetic Florentine foresaw, was through death. Ottaviano was coming of age. Feo would have to have Girolamo's heir murdered before he could claim the rule of Imola and Forlì, or Ottaviano would have to kill Feo to claim his birthright.

In 1495 Ottaviano turned sixteen, finally old enough take over his dominions. Forlì and Imola crackled with tension. Who would win this undeclared tug-of-war? How would Caterina choose between her son and her lover? Antonio Ordelaffi, quick to smell a weakness, tried to take advantage of the situation by inciting the Orcioli and Marcobelli families to revolt, but the plot was crushed before it could hatch. Once again Feo shut down the city of Forlì. No one was allowed in or out without his approval.

The first eruption of open hostility came during an argument between Giacomo and Ottaviano. The teenage boy, furious at the smug Giacomo, usurper of his mother and his lands, gave vent to a tirade. Giacomo halted his venomous accusations with a resounding slap. Caterina sat by silently, torn between her lover and her son.

Shocked, Caterina's own retainers decided to take matters into their own hands. Giovanni Antonio Ghetti, who had helped liberate Ravaldino from Tommaso Feo so that Giacomo could take his place, took the lead in this plot. His wife, Rosa, was Caterina's favorite lady in waiting, and together this couple knew, more than anyone else, how far Caterina had regressed under the influence of Giacomo. They hardly recognized her as the confident woman they had once admired. Ghetti's relative Domenico joined in, along with two priests, one being the unscrupulous Antonio Pavagliotta, who needed money to support his mistress and three children. The other cleric, Domenico da Bagnacavallo, was looking to curry a little favor with the powerful Cardinal Riario, who certainly would not object to the deed the plotters planned to carry out. They rounded out the crew with one of Ghetti's servants, who was particularly skilled with a knife.

On August 27, 1495, Caterina and Giacomo had gone for a picnic in the woods outside Forlì, along with her oldest children, Ottaviano, Cesare, and Bianca. In a rare moment of domestic peace, the whole group was singing merrily together in celebration of a successful day's hunt. Cheeks flushed from the activities, eyelids heavy from the abundant lunch, the family traveled in a pleasant little cavalcade along the road. Caterina sat in a carriage with Bianca, surrounded by brightly clad servants carrying the spoils of the chase, while Giacomo, Cesare, and Ottaviano, on horseback, brought up the rear, together with the usual bodyguards.

They crossed the bridge by the Schiavonia gate of Forlì. As Caterina's cart passed through the gate, Ghetti and his followers stepped out of their hiding places, cutting Giacomo off from the rest of the group. "What brings you here, Gian Antonio?" asked Feo in good humor. "Are you well?"

Ghetti's accomplices casually took the reins of Feo's horse and held them fast. "I'm quite well," responded Ghetti, smiling as his servant came up behind Giacomo and stabbed him in the back.

Feo fell from his horse, into the arms of his killers, able to gasp only "Oh God! Oh my lady! I am dead!"
⁶
before falling to the ground amid a hail of blows.

Caterina's Sforza reflexes responded instantly. In a flash, she leapt out of the carriage and onto the nearest horse and galloped to the safety of Ravaldino. Ottaviano and Cesare had already raced to the house of Paolo Denti, a local nobleman, while Feo's own bodyguards had scattered at the first sign of trouble. Glancing over her shoulder, Caterina searched through her tears for a glimpse of her beloved. The horrific vision of Feo's mangled body falling lifeless into a ditch was burned into her mind.

I
N CANTO XXVII
of Dante's
Inferno,
as the Florentine poet wends his way through the darkest circles of the damned, one of the suffering souls halts him. From his prison of flames, Guido di Montefeltro, a celebrated
condottiere
who gave many years of service to Forlì, begs to know if his beloved town is at peace or at war.

"That Romagna of yours," Dante sadly replies, "is not and never was without war in the heart of its tyrants."
¹
Between the Guelph and Ghibelline contests and power-hungry tyrants ruling its towns, Romagna had rarely known peace and stability since the distant days of the Roman Empire.

In 1495, the furious, grief-stricken Caterina Sforza added her own episode to Forlì's violent history. After the death of young Giacomo Feo, the countess unleashed a torrent of reprisals. The assassin, Giovanni Antonio Ghetti, was the first to pay. Still stained with Feo's blood, he made a boastful entrance into the main piazza of Forlì, accompanied by his cousin Bernardino and his two clerical accomplices. They summoned the Forlivesi to the square with cries of "Caterina! Caterina!" and "Ottaviano! Ottaviano!" The ubiquitous scribe Co- belli led the rush to the piazza, where Ghetti and his co-conspirators were proclaiming that they had liberated the city from the "traitor Feo." The killers even went so far as to brag that Caterina and Ottaviano had ordered them to do so. Like Cassius and Brutus, they expected to be hailed as liberators for saving the people from tyranny. Or perhaps they were relying on a desperate gambit: when Caterina saw her people rejoicing in Feo's death, she would finally realize how much hostility her lover had engendered over the years and would find it in herself to treat his assassins with clemency. It was a grave miscalculation.

Caterina's chief of police came out to investigate the ruckus, and upon seeing the bloody swords and hearing the braggarts' cries, he hastened to report to Ravaldino. Moments later, he returned, accompanied by a contingent of soldiers. They seized Ghetti by the shoulders, in the same fashion that Ghetti himself had arrested Tommaso Feo four years ago in Ravaldino. And just as Tommaso did, Ghetti struggled free and tried to escape by darting through the crowds. The other assassins scattered; sympathetic townspeople helped Antonio Pavagliotta and several others to scale the city walls, while Domenico da Bagnacavallo found refuge at his cousin's house by hiding in a dowry chest.

The police chief sealed Ghetti's fate with one sentence: "One hundred ducats to whoever brings Ghetti to the countess, dead or alive!" A militiaman by the name of Bernardo chased Ghetti down to the cemetery of Santa Croce. There, among the tombs, Bernardo and his accomplice executed him in the manner by which murderers were punished in Dante's Hell. They cleaved his head from crown to teeth, then lopped off his fingers and other extremities, scattering them among the graves.

But Caterina's thirst for revenge was not sated. Summoning Tommaso Feo from his governorship of Imola, she ordered him to sack and raze Ghetti's house. Tommaso, who had long borne a grudge against Ghetti for conspiring to remove him from the fortress of Ravaldino, eagerly obliged. Ghetti's wife, Rosa, Caterina's former confidante and friend, was inside the castle with several of their children. They all were thrown down one of the deep wells of Ravaldino and left to die. A few days later, the last Ghetti scion was dispatched; soldiers found the five-year-old son in the care of a friend of the family and slit his throat.

The chronicler Cobelli, despite his ill-treatment by Caterina over the Antonio Maria Ordelaffi affair, took pains in his account to specify that Caterina did not order the murder of the women and children.
²
The letters flying up and down the Italian peninsula told another story. "She has used maximum cruelty against a priest," wrote the Milanese ambassador Francesco Tranchedini to Duke Ludovico, and "that which seems most detestable, she had women killed, the wives of the two Ghetti brothers, the young sons aged three and nine months and even the nurse. All Romagna is crying to the heavens."
³

Whether or not Caterina gave the order for the murder of innocents, she never intervened to save Ghetti's wife or children. Nor did she call a halt when her soldiers rounded up every family known to be hostile to Feo and threw them into dungeons, hanged them in the square, or drove them into exile. Tranchedini, writing from Bologna, was not an eyewitness, but he informed the duke that the local people were horrified to hear that "the countess had cruelly punished anyone she got her hands on, as accomplices of the two who killed Feo."
⁴

The Ghetti family's horrendous deaths marked the beginning of the darkest moment of Caterina's life. She had lost control of her state, her position, and her dignity through her passion for Feo, but in avenging his death she seemed to take leave of her soul.

On the night of the murder, several members of the confraternity of the Battuti Neri retrieved Giacomo's body from the ditch outside the Schiavonia gate, bringing the tattered carcass to the Church of San Girolamo. Cobelli slipped in to see what had happened to Feo. "What shame! What cruelty!" he lamented in his diary. "Such a beautiful face rent like a split pomegranate!"
⁵
The fine brocade jacket once tightly fitted to his broad shoulders now hung from the corpse in shreds, soaked in blood.

The following morning, hundreds assembled outside Ravaldino wearing the somber colors of mourning. The drawbridge was lowered and a procession slowly crossed toward the city gate. The vicar of the bishop of Forlì, dressed in funerary robes, walked in front, accompanied by Scipione Riario, Girolamo's natural son, now in his twenties, who lived with the family. Caterina came next, holding the hand of little Bernardino, her three-year-old son by Feo. Her pale face bore the signs of a sleepless night, but her expression was unreadable. She looked at no one and acknowledged nothing except the little boy by her side.

The Sforza-Feo household made an impressive sight, with ambassadors, ladies in waiting, and an honor guard in polished armor wending their way across the moat. Three pages, dressed in mourning livery, rode with the group. The first displayed Feo's sword and golden spur, the second his helmet, and the last his cuirass, denoting Giacomo's knightly status. Dozens of nobles, both local and foreign, joined the cortege as they headed into the city. Others poured into Forlì from neighboring towns, gathering in the market square, where a giant catafalque had been prepared during the night. The towering monument was draped in gold cloth and surrounded by torches. At the appointed time, the canons of the cathedral, the parish priests, and the confraternities encircled the platform, bearing aloft thirty-three crosses as they sang psalms and prayers. The air was heavy with the scent of incense; a slowly cadenced chant set a stately pace for the procession that then wound to the Church of San Girolamo. Count Girolamo Riario, lord of Forlì, had not received such elaborate obsequies.

Feo was temporarily laid to rest in the chapel containing the splendid tomb of the unfortunate Barbara Manfredi, the murdered wife of Pino Ordelaffi. Never to be outdone by the former ruling family, Caterina would soon commission a monument to outshine that of the discarded Ordelaffi bride. Although he was almost universally loathed in life, Giacomo Feo drew hundreds to his funeral, many undoubtedly spurred by the fear that Caterina might take vengeance on them if they did not appear.

But Feo's funeral offered only a moment of respite. Soon the countess continued her campaign of retribution, using all means at her disposal. Caterina rounded up the rest of the conspirators and targeted virtually anyone who had resented Giacomo Feo. The Marcobelli family, the Orcioli family, and the delle Selle family saw their houses torn down, their warehouses sacked, and their relatives thrown into the Ravaldino dungeons. An entire neighborhood of Forlì was sacked and destroyed as Caterina tried to eradicate all those hostile to Feo. In Imola, Tommaso Feo also worked ceaselessly to avenge his brother, filling the jail cells and torture chambers. Caterina dispatched agents to hunt down the remaining fugitives.

Informers soon betrayed the hiding place of Domenico da Bagnacavallo, and a squadron retrieved the terrified priest from his refuge inside his cousin's dowry chest. Brought to Ravaldino, he was tortured by fire until he gave up the names of his accomplices. His "confession" poured salt on Caterina's open wounds. He swore that when Giovanni Antonio Ghetti had recruited the priest, the assassination had been approved not only by Cardinal Raffaello Riario but also by Ottaviano, Caterina's own son.

Now Caterina's public cruelty reached its apex. The offending priest was stripped almost nude in the square and tied by his feet to the back of a horse. The executioner drove the animal through the streets to just outside the city walls, until they reached the spot where Bagnacavallo and his co-conspirators had killed Feo. The grisly cavalcade then turned and dragged the battered priest down alleys, through refuse, and over stones, then back to the piazza. Despite his numerous wounds, the man was still alive. A partisan of Feo sliced open the offender's face: vicious revenge for the disfigurement of Giacomo. While Bagnacavallo whispered prayers of penitence, the soldiers beat and stabbed him to death, then dismembered the corpse.

Two days after Feo's funeral, Caterina finally tackled her thorny domestic situation. Ottaviano and Cesare, afraid of their mother's grief and anger, had sought safety in the house of the Denti family. Paolo Denti, head of the household, was the soldier who had stubbornly refused to surrender the Riario children to Girolamo's murderers seven years earlier. Now he was risking his life for the Riario heirs again. Ottaviano's conspicuous absence from the funeral rendered him guilty in Caterina's eyes. The Forlivesi watched in astonishment as armed guards surrounded the Denti palace, issuing a summons for Ottaviano and his brother to appear before their mother at Ravaldino. The rightful heir to the city—who had stood with a knife at his throat after the death of his father—was now under arrest at his mother's behest. Convinced that Caterina had gone too far, an angry crowd followed Ottaviano and his armed escort back to Ravaldino. As the shouting Forlivesi approached the ramparts, cannon fire drowned their objections. The townspeople left Ottaviano to face his mother alone. No witnesses, except for a few tightlipped family intimates and Scipione Riario, Caterina's stepson, were permitted at the interview between the heir to Forlì and his regent. Accusations flew and recriminations resounded as the family members aired their many grievances. Ottaviano was put under house arrest and confined to the fortress under the watchful eye of his mother. Scipione, who had objected to the violence of Caterina's reprisals, was locked in one of the dungeons, where he served a bitter sentence of eighteen months.