The Tigress of Forli (38 page)

No one knew who sent them; most speculated Florence, although others thought it might have been Ludovico the Moor. But the fact was that it could have been Cardinal Riario from Savona, or Giovanni Bentivoglio from Bologna, for now sympathies were starting to turn toward Caterina.

Cesare knew he was running out of time, he was still waiting for money to pay his troops, and although he knew the funds were forthcoming, he also had been apprised that Giovanni Sforza had almost managed to intercept and seize his precious cash. Cesare's outraged father sputtered tirades against Caterina and the house of Sforza, "the seed of the serpent Satan!"
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The Borgia's list of enemies was growing and the more time he spent stalled by a woman, the more he would seem weak in the eyes of his adversaries. He could break a lance or straighten a horseshoe in his bare hands. He could kill a bull in a ring, but he couldn't defeat this woman.

He decided to concentrate all his energies on what his experts had discovered to be the weakest section of wall: the southern stretch facing the mountains. For two days he moved his guns to the other side of the fort, digging trenches and building protective ramparts for the gunmen. Most of his soldiers were in the city, celebrating Epiphany, the Feast of the Three Kings who came to see the infant Jesus. Instead of giving gifts, as was traditional in Europe, the soldiers were looting and pillaging and bringing prostitutes to their banqueting table. The local chronicler Bernardi was horrified by their obscene pranks and how they "blessed the table in their own way,"
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finding it particularly abhorrent that they ate standing up. When the festivities ended, Cesare began the siege again. Day and night he pummeled the southern wall of Ravaldino with cannonballs. The blows began to take effect, ripping holes in the long straight curtain wall. Caterina and her men never showed signs of worry, and as night fell they raced to repair the breaks with sandbags or stones, so that the next morning found the wall whole again. Caterina slyly undermined the morale of Cesare's men; at night as the French soldiers were huddled in frozen ditches with their cannons, they could hear pipes and drums playing inside the fort. While those in the fortress repaired the walls and tended the wounded, Caterina kept up the illusion that they were simply having a merry dance. From time to time, the defenders of Ravaldino would scrawl a gibe onto one of the cannonballs: "Hey, slow down, you'll hit our toilets!"

But as pieces of the Ravaldino wall fell, they began to pile up in the moat, slowly creating a pathway. Cesare, seeing his opportunity, ordered every peasant in Forlì to bring a bundle of logs for his soldiers to build into rafts, and he requisitioned two long flat riverboats from Ravenna. On January 12, three weeks after Cesare had made his entry into Forlì, the Borgia commander threw everything he had at the now fragile castle wall. The extra pay had arrived and he distributed the money liberally, offering incentives for harder work. The efforts paid off, and Cesare's artillery ripped a large breach into Caterina's wall. Fallen debris hindered the defenders' attempts to repair the damage, as did well-aimed shots from the falconets. Cesare's men made the log rafts and anchored them to the rubble in the half-filled moat. The enemy now had a bridge into Caterina's fort. At noon Cesare went to lunch with his commanding officers and boasted, "Today is Sunday; by Tuesday Lady Caterina will be in my hands."
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The officers protested that he should not cry victory too soon. Undoubtedly the countess would repair to the keep and they would have to besiege the stronghold. A confident Cesare offered a three-hundred-ducat wager on the outcome.

While Cesare was taking bets, Caterina was repositioning her guns. Using the fallen pieces of stone as cover, she aligned all her weapons to fire on the opening in the wall. A French assault through that crevice would be a suicide run. Cesare, having finished his meal, strode back to the moat and issued the order to take the citadel. The soldiers crossed the makeshift bridge in maniples of sixteen, climbing through the breach and pouring into the citadel.

Not one shot greeted them. Caterina's guns remained silent, and none of the defenders met Cesare's soldiers head-on. The desertion of Caterina's camp had begun; the soldiers at the breach had seen a window of freedom and had taken it. A Swiss mercenary named Cupizer climbed unimpeded to the top of the Porta Cotogni and plucked Caterina's standard, the Riario rose and the Sforza viper, from the top. The fortress was taken, and only one question remained: would the last band of defenders put their weapons down quietly or would they fight to the death?

Caterina never hesitated. She strode out of the keep to meet her attackers, followed by Alessandro Sforza, her older brother; Scipione Riario, her stepson; and her few remaining loyal men. She fought in the front ranks, refusing to yield when her officers tried to call for a retreat. The Venetian mercenary Sanuto was already amazed by her spirit, but when he saw that she knew how to handle a sword and "wounded many men,"
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he was astounded. For two hours she fought side by side with her men through the endless onslaught of Cesare's soldiers. By late afternoon, the defenders were exhausted yet the stream of Cesare's mercenaries seemed endless. Caterina ordered her men to gather ammunition, wood, straw—anything flammable—and make a broad wall of fire. The curtain of smoke slowed the invaders, offering the defenders a moment of respite as the French labored to extinguish the flames. No sooner had the French beaten down the bonfire than Caterina and her soldiers came running toward them to continue the fight. Eyes watering from the smoke and arms aching from the heavy sword, Caterina was the equal of any man on the battlefield. One by one, her weary comrades at arms, aware that they had lost, hoped to escape with their lives by raising the white flag of surrender. But drawing strength from desperation, as the marquis of Mantua wrote, Caterina persisted, with the walls of her Paradise to her back, even as her companions laid down their arms. She had no intention of leaving the battlefield alive. Her captains, her castellan, and her brother were all taken prisoner, but Caterina backed her way into the keep. As she sealed the entry gate, she was already barking orders to the soldiers to prepare for a siege.

Cesare, however, had one last trick up his sleeve. He rode up to the keep, his white horse darkened by soot and grime amid the carnage. The Borgia herald sounded his trumpet and Caterina was called to speak to Cesare for the third and last time. Cesare, feigning solicitous concern, begged Caterina to stop this pointless waste of lives. Caterina replied that if he respected life as much as he claimed, he would show mercy to her townspeople and to her soldiers who had surrendered to him. Before she could utter another word, a heavy hand fell on her shoulder, and she heard a voice in French say, "Madame, you are a prisoner of my lord, the constable of Dijon." Caterina had been betrayed from within the walls of her own castle.

How could it happen that she was surprised within her own stronghold? Many contemporaries pondered the reasons for the sudden fall of the castle. The surprise turn of events implied treachery. Andrea Bernardi, while writing his chronicle under the watchful eye of Cesare Borgia, hinted that the fortress "was taken by things seen and unseen." Cesare himself was the first to admit in a letter to his father that he "never would have taken the castle if all her men had the countess's spirit." Gian Giacomo Trivulzio in Milan, astonished by Caterina's capture, claimed to the ambassador of the duke of Ferrara that "there must have been great cowardice in that castle to be lost so pathetically." As far as he could tell the fortress should have been able to hold out for fifteen more days.

Machiavelli, an open admirer of Cesare Borgia, analyzed the fall of Forlì closely in his book
On the Art of War.
"The fortress was divided in three parts and each part was separated by trenches and water from the others with bridges linking the structures together. Once the duke with his artillery had demolished one of the areas of the fortress and opened a hole in the wall; once Giovanni da Casale who was in charge of guarding it, didn't defend that opening, but retreated to some other part, the duke's troops entered without any conflict through that spot and took everything in a moment."
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But the Florentine pundit maintained that the true weakness was Caterina, who "had more faith in her fortresses than in conquering the love of her people."
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Giovanni da Casale's name soon became synonymous with
traitor
. The Florentine historian Guicciardini, writing a few years later, condemned Casale's men as being of "the same infamy and misery of Giovanni da Casale, their captain."
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Giovanni had been named as Caterina's latest lover by the Venetian mercenary Sanuto. But in the year after Giovanni de' Medici's death, speculation linked Caterina with every man who came near her. Achille and Polidoro Tiberti, the brothers from Cesena, had each been rumored as paramours despite the fact that they both worked actively against the countess at the behest of Cesare Borgia. Ottaviano Manfredi, the on-again, off-again claimant to Faenza, had also been romantically tied to her, although he had led an attack on Forlì for Venice. Even poor Francesco Fortunati, the priest from Cascina, had been accused of breaking his vows with the beautiful countess. Like an account from tabloid journalism, Giovanni da Casale's supposed betrayal was rendered all the more poignant because he was presumed to be Caterina's lover. His reputation in tatters—a serious problem for a soldier for hire—Casale attempted to refute the accusations, laying the blame on Caterina's brother Alessandro for his cowardice as well as the rivalries and insubordination among his fellow officers. How a French soldier gained access to the sealed keep remains a mystery, but as one modern writer put it, "The castellan was a traitor, a coward, or a fool."
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Machiavelli best summed up that cold evening of January 12: "The poor defenses of the fortress and the little wisdom of those defending it shamed the great undertaking of the countess."
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Contemporaries noticed that Cesare, although eager to claim his prize, took his time entering the keep, waiting for it to be completely subdued. Once inside, he encountered the first of many problems that Caterina would cause for him. The French soldier, a certain Bernard, who had captured the countess, demanded his reward. Cesare ordered that the soldier be paid two thousand ducats. Outraged, Bernard reminded Cesare that he had publicly promised ten thousand ducats for the countess. Cesare's protests were silenced as the soldier pulled out his dagger and held it to Caterina's throat. If Cesare denied him his full prize, threatened Bernard, then all he would get of Caterina was her head. Then the captain of the French forces, Yves D'Allegre, raced to the defense of his officer, Bernard, and soon the keep resounded with shouts in French, Spanish, and Italian. Over the weeks of watching Caterina, D'Allegre had been smitten by her beauty, bravery, and ingenuity. The ancient French sense of chivalry stirred in the soldier, who balked at Caterina's being consigned directly to Cesare. Under French law, no woman could be taken as a prisoner of war; in D'Allegre's hands, she would be in the custody of the king of France. The Borgia family recognized no such niceties. In their clutches, Caterina would meet a brutal end. The negotiations between Bernard, who wanted money, D'Allegre, who desired honor, and Cesare, who ached for revenge, resulted in D'Allegre's successfully declaring Caterina to be under the protection of Louis XII; therefore she could not be tortured, imprisoned, or killed. As a professional soldier, he thought he had secured Caterina's safety. But Cesare had fought too hard for this particular prize to give it up so lightly. He insisted that the countess be entrusted to the Borgias for "safekeeping." Although technically under the jurisdiction of the French and therefore inviolate, she was thereby consigned to Cesare, who, unbeknownst to the French, did not live by a reliable code of ethics.

Well past midnight, Caterina was led out of the keep into the carnage surrounding her citadel. Seven hundred lay dead, defenders and assailants alike. Caterina stepped over rubble and bodies. Scattered fragments of the sumptuous bronze monument she had made in honor of Giacomo Feo lay on the ground; the urn had been smashed and the prized bronze, the best metal for artillery, had been carted away to be melted and made into more weapons. Cesare's soldiers were disappointed with the paltry contents of the treasury; convinced that the defenders had swallowed gold ducats or jewels for safekeeping, they slit the bodies open to search the entrails. The acrid smell of gunpowder stung Caterina's eyes and burned in her nose and throat, mercifully covering the stench of death. Caterina had ordered all the ammunition in the fortress burned, to ensure that the fall of her castle would not provision Cesare's attack on his next target. Caterina didn't wince at the horror but commented that the fate of the dead didn't upset her as much as that of the survivors.
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Death in combat was infinitely more honorable than survival through surrender. The French soldiers sorted their prisoners; those who were Italian were allowed to live, but the foreign mercenaries were put to death. Caterina's brother, her secretary, and a priest who had remained to the bitter end to administer the sacraments to Caterina and her men were all apprehended. A large number of women—ladies in waiting and maidservants—who had remained in the fort, loyal to their mistress, were now in the hands of the troops. Several prisoners were killed, including the unfortunate priest who had stayed by Caterina's side and a young courtier who had gallantly defended the countess. Cesare put ransoms on the noblemen, which were soon paid, but there would be no freedom for Caterina. She was led from the fortress, her home for twelve years, into an uncertain future. As the chronicler Bernardi put it, "Paradise was now governed by devils."
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A heavy escort accompanied Caterina to the palace of Luffo Numai, the changeable Forlivese nobleman who had welcomed Cesare into his home. The Borgia captain was happily ensconced in the comfortable house. With his dinner warm on the table and the Sangiovese wine ready to wash away the day's bloodshed, Cesare savored the moment when Caterina's children would be brought to him in chains. With all the heirs present, his victory would be complete. His envoys, however, returned empty-handed. Caterina informed her captor that she had sent her children to Florence before the siege and, as they were all Florentine citizens through her marriage to Giovanni de' Medici, he would be unable to demand their release into his custody. Cesare may have captured her fortress and even her person, but his claim on the cities of Imola and Forlì would remain tenuous as long as the rightful lord was still alive. Once again Cesare had been outwitted; his pretensions to nobility, grace, and chivalry were now smothered by rage. Cesare had never been able to make Caterina fear him, and her taunts had shown the world that she didn't respect him. Borgia would regain his honor by taking hers.