Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (11 page)

Rumours flew around the city as to the author, or authors, of the crime: the names of Giovanni Sforza, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and Ascanio Sforza were mentioned. Within a week, however, after Alexander had exonerated those named, all inquiries were suspended. It seemed that the Borgias now had a good idea of who was responsible and intended to bide their time to pursue their vendetta. The most likely candidates were the Orsini, whose vendetta with the Borgias went back to the first year of Alexander’s papacy when they had conspired to encircle him by acquiring the castles of Cerveteri and Anguillara; Alexander could not forgive them their desertion to the French at the end of 1494. He had retaliated with his attempt to seize their lands for Gandia in 1496 but the real spark which lit the fuse of Orsini anger was the death of the clan leader, Virginio Orsini, still in prison in Naples for his treachery in 1494, on 13 January 1497, which they held to have been instigated by the Borgias. By the laws of the vendetta, Virginio’s death called for revenge, and how better could his family avenge themselves on Alexander than by engineering the death of his favourite son? As a Venetian source reported at the end of the year: ‘This Pope plotted to ruin the Orsini because the Orsini for sure caused the death of his son the Duke of Gandia.’ The Borgias’ pursuit of the vendetta would be carried out with great subtlety and cruelty by Cesare in the years to come.

Grief and anger, however, did not prevent the Borgias from pursuing their political and dynastic aims. At the same consistory in which he had mourned Juan Gandia’s death, Alexander had returned to the subject of Lucrezia’s divorce from Giovanni Sforza. He and Cesare had already laid their plans for a new marriage for Lucrezia even before the murder. The plan, hatched at the time of the announcement of Cesare as legate for the coronation of King Federigo in Naples, was for Cesare to squeeze every advantage he could from the grateful King. This included a Neapolitan marriage for Lucrezia, once her divorce from Giovanni Sforza was obtained. Gandia’s murder deferred the plan; Cesare left Rome six weeks after his brother’s death, and the coronation of Federigo at Capua took place on 11 August. King and legate then travelled together to enjoy the tainted pleasures of Naples: when Cesare returned to Rome on 5 September, Isabella d’Este’s agent reported: ‘Monsignor of Valencia has returned from the Kingdom after crowning King Federigo and he too is sick of the French disease [syphilis].’ Even before he returned, Ascanio Sforza reported in a cipher letter to Ludovico that negotiations were going on between the Pope and the Prince of Salerno ‘to give Dona Lucretia . . . to the son of the prince with certain conditions which, if true and put into effect, I believe will not result to the benefit either of the King or of Italy . . .’
²³

Lucrezia’s second marriage was to be to Alfonso, natural son of Alfonso II of Naples and brother of Sancia, and merely a stepping stone to the realization of Cesare’s new ambitions. Gandia’s death had changed everything: now Cesare was to be the foundation of the family’s earthly ambitions which, in 1497, focused on a marriage between him and Carlotta, legitimate daughter of King Federigo. In September a commission headed by two cardinals pronounced sentence of divorce between Lucrezia and Giovanni on the grounds of the latter’s impotence.
²⁴
The Borgias pushed hard to get Giovanni Sforza to agree to the divorce, and in order to accommodate the Pope the senior Sforza were prepared to abandon him. Throughout the autumn they pressed him relentlessly to sign a mandate agreeing to the Pope’s terms, that is, of non-consummation. The wretched Sforza twisted and turned. He wanted the sentence nullifying the marriage to be based on grounds other than his non-consummation, as less offensive to his honour; he wanted the return of those of his possessions which were in the hands of Lucrezia, and to keep her dowry, with a clause agreed by the Pope and Lucrezia on behalf of herself and any future heirs guaranteeing its non-returnability.
²⁵

Apparently having already signed a mandate agreeing to the divorce on the grounds of non-consummation he now wished to substitute it for one simply nullifying the marriage.
²⁶
Ludovico’s chancellor, Thomasino Tormelli, who had been sent to fetch ‘this blessed mandate’ (‘
questo benedetto Mandato
’, Sforza’s signed statement agreeing to the divorce) from Pesaro, told Ludovico in exasperation that if he were to present this form to the Pope, Alexander would explode with fury and probably proceed to the sentence without further delay anyway.
²⁷
In response to a long wail from Giovanni Sforza, Ludovico told him firmly on 12 December to submit to the decisions of Ascanio in dealing with the Pope. On 21 December, Tormelli wrote to Ludovico informing him of the Pope’s joy at the settlement of the matter and the pronouncement of the divorce the previous day, and of his great gratitude to Ludovico for his intervention: ‘The joy which you have given him is as great as if you had given him 200,000 ducats.’
²⁸
Alexander had every reason to be joyful as he had obtained everything he wanted – Giovanni Sforza’s mandate attesting to non-consummation (signed in Pesaro on 18 November) and the return of the dowry of 30,000 ducats. A letter from a weary Ascanio Sforza revealed the difficult negotiations behind the final settlement: all he had secured for the ‘small benefit’ of Giovanni Sforza was the return of jewels and things given by him to Lucrezia which, according to the Pope, were worth several thousand ducats.
²⁹
Lucrezia herself seems to have had no regrets over her enforced separation from her husband of more than four years. According to Taberna, she appeared at the Vatican on 20 December 1497 for the promulgation of her divorce, when she made a graceful speech which he described as worthy of Cicero in its eloquence. Within just over six months she would be married for a second time.

4. The Tragic Duchess of Bisceglie

‘We have entrusted to our beloved daughter in Christ, the noble lady, Lucretia de Borgia, Duchess of Biseglia [sic], the office of keeper of the castle, as well as the government of our cities of Spoleto and Foligno, and of the county and district about them. Having perfect confidence in the intelligence, fidelity and probity of the Duchess . . . We trust that you will receive the Duchess Lucretia as is your duty, with all due honour as your regent, and show her submission in all things . . .’

– Alexander VI to the Priors of Spoleto, 18 August 1499

Alexander may have got what he wanted but the cost to Lucrezia’s reputation was high. Few believed that her marriage had not been consummated or that Giovanni Sforza was impotent, since his first wife had died in childbirth (his third wife would bear him two children). The idea that Lucrezia was a virgin, so necessary for her remarriage, was regarded as ludicrous. As Matarazzo, a Perugian chronicler unfavourable to the Borgias, put it: ‘[it was] a conclusion that set all Italy laughing . . . it was common knowledge that she had been and was then the greatest whore there ever was in Rome’. Sforza’s allegation that Alexander had taken Lucrezia from him to sleep with her himself became common currency. It may even be that he believed it. The closeness of the Borgias made the accusation of incest feasible; even Juan Gandia had been charged with sleeping with his sister. Both Alexander and Cesare loved Lucrezia deeply: in fact it seems that she was the only woman whom Cesare ever cared for.

Within months of the divorce Lucrezia was involved in further sexual scandal. On 14 February 1498, the body of Pedro Calderon, known as Perotto, a handsome young Spaniard who served in the Pope’s chamber, was discovered in the Tiber. According to Burchard who in his position as papal master of ceremonies was well up in palace gossip, on the night of the 8th Perotto ‘fell, not of his own will, into the Tiber . . . of which there is much said in the city’. And according to Marin Sanudo, the drowned body of Pantasilea, one of Lucrezia’s women, was found with him. It seems likely that Cesare had them both killed for reasons intimately connected with Lucrezia, who was almost certainly having an affair with Perotto. Knowledge of this affair may well have been a reason for her seclusion in San Sisto at a time when her divorce from Sforza was being planned by Alexander and Cesare in June the previous year. Shortly before the discovery of Perotto’s body in February 1498, Cristoforo Poggio, agent of the Bentivoglio family of Bologna, reported that Perotto had vanished mysteriously and was thought to be in prison ‘for having got His Holiness’s daughter, Lucrezia, with child’.
¹
In March 1498, a report by the Ferrarese envoy to Duke Ercole alleged that Lucrezia had given birth to a child. Since at that very moment negotiations for a second marriage for Lucrezia were going on, Cesare had every reason to remove any evidence of misconduct on his sister’s part by avenging himself on Perotto. Nothing and no one would be allowed to come in the way of his plans for Lucrezia which were so closely allied with his own.

The whole mysterious affair was complicated by the birth of a boy at around the same time. This was the notorious Giovanni Borgia, known as the ‘
Infans Romanus
’, who was certainly Alexander’s child. Although his paternity was at first attributed to Cesare, Alexander later admitted it in a secret Bull of September 1502. The timing of the birth, however, led people to believe that he was Lucrezia’s son, even, some said, fathered by the Pope. The fact that years later he was welcomed and well treated by the family of Lucrezia’s third husband where he was known as her half-brother, makes these rumours unlikely. What happened to Lucrezia’s child, if child there was – and the murders of Perotto and Pantasilea tend to support such a supposition – has never been revealed. It may, given Lucrezia’s later history of difficult pregnancies, have died at or soon after birth.

The craziness, cruelty and danger of Roman life was illustrated by an incident at that time, recorded meticulously by Burchard:

In these days was imprisoned Cursetta, a certain courtesan, that is honest prostitute, who had amongst her household a Moor who used to go about dressed as a woman, who called himself Barbara the Spaniard and knew her carnally in I know not what manner, and for this they were both led through the city in scandal, [Cursetta] dressed in black velvet to the ground but not bound, but the Moor, in female dress, with his upper arms tied behind his back, and the skirts of his dress and shift raised up to his navel, so that all could see his testicles and thus his fraud was clear. Having made a circle of the city, Cursetta was set free; the Moor was thrown into prison, and on Saturday the seventh of this month of April, he was led out with two robbers from the Torre di Nona, preceded by a constable mounted on an ass bearing a cane to which was tied the two testicles cut off from a Jew who had copulated with a Christian woman, and taken to the Campo di Fiore where the two thieves were hanged. The Moor was placed on top of a pyre and tied to the pillory, the cord round his neck was twisted strongly behind the column, and the faggots set alight, but they would not burn because of the heavy rain, but his legs at last were burnt being closest to the wood.

Burning at the stake was normally the punishment for sodomy or heresy (at the end of that month of April 1498, for example, the fanatical reforming friar Girolamo Savonarola died at the stake in Florence). The manner of the Moor’s death may have prompted Burchard’s curious phrase ‘[he] knew her carnally in I know not what manner’. On the same day six peasants were put in ‘the mitre’ (presumably the stocks) after having been whipped through the streets, for a particularly disgusting fraud: they had sold olive oil to syphilis sufferers with which to bathe themselves in the hope of a cure; afterwards the vendors had put the oil back in their pitchers and sold it to unsuspecting customers.

Alexander willingly received Jews expelled from Spain by his extreme Catholic ‘patroness’ Queen Isabella; he regarded them not only as useful citizens but as a potential source of revenue. Large sums of money would be required to fund the Borgias’ new plans for Cesare, and that summer there was a public conversion of three hundred Jews, or
marrani
, in the piazza of St Peter’s, a grand occasion witnessed by Lucrezia and Sancia,
²
after which the ‘converts’ processed in scapulars marked with crosses to the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where they deposited them. Sanudo certainly saw this as yet another money-raising move by the Borgia Pope: ‘From letters I understand that the Pope ordered about 300 Spanish
marrani
dressed in yellow with a candle in the hand to proceed to Minerva . . . which was their public punishment. The secret one will be their money, as was done with the condemned Bishop of Calahorra [Pedro de Aranda, arrested and charged with heresy on 21 April 1498].’
³
Other sources of funds were the estates of dead or disgraced churchmen: when the papal secretary Bartolomeu Flores, Archbishop of Cosenza, was arrested on the charge of forging papal briefs,
⁴
Alexander confiscated his goods and his room in the Vatican with all its furniture and hangings which he gave to one of his confidants, Juan Marrades, and his archbishopric to another favourite, the chamberlain Jacopo Casanova. The Cardinal of Genoa died in March 1498: the Pope sent another of his Spanish chamberlains, Juan Ferrera, to take charge of his goods, and gave his archbishopric to a natural brother of Ascanio Sforza.

The archbishopric was probably the last favour the Sforza could expect from the Pope. Not only was Alexander contemplating a second marriage for Lucrezia into the Aragonese royal family of Naples, natural enemies of the Sforza, but on April Charles VIII of France died at Amboise, an event which presaged further danger for both the Sforza and the Aragonese. Charles’s successor, Louis XII, inherited not only Charles’s claims to Naples but, in his own right, a valid claim to the Duchy of Milan. What is more he wanted a dispensation from the Pope to put aside his wife, Jeanne de France, and to marry his predecessor’s widow, Anne de Bretagne, in order to keep Anne’s duchy of Brittany within the Kingdom of France. At that time the Pope and Cesare still saw their future with Naples but the needs and ambitions of the new French King would play a pivotal part in their policy.

That summer Alexander focused on Naples for his children’s marriages, negotiating with King Federigo to marry Lucrezia to Sancia’s brother, Alfonso, illegitimate son of the Duke of Calabria. His real goal, however, was to marry Cesare to Carlotta, the King’s legitimate daughter. To the Pope’s fury, Federigo made difficulties. Having obtained legitimization of his accession from the Borgias, he was far from eager to accommodate the Pope’s bastards with further marriages, money and lands in his Kingdom. Ascanio Sforza watched nervously from the sidelines as the Neapolitan negotiations proceeded. Early in May he reported the Pope’s anger with King Federigo’s negative attitude to the marriages.
⁵
The King was not disposed to grant Alfonso a considerable estate and the Pope was enraged and humiliated at this slight, particularly since the affair had become public knowledge.
⁶
Alexander’s reaction was to cover up by pretending that he intended to marry Lucrezia to Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina (who was to be executed by Cesare five years later).

He continued the pretence through the summer until, on 15 July, Alfonso arrived secretly in Rome. ‘This morning Don Alfonso arrived here,’ Ascanio reported to his brother, ‘and although he came as far as Marino with 50 horse, from Marino to here he brought only 6 or 7, as His Holiness wished for secrecy. He dined with me in the Palace [Vatican] then he went to meet His Holiness who greeted him very warmly; this evening he lodges in the house of the Princess his sister [Sancia] under guise of secrecy.’ In fact, Ascanio added, his arrival was widely known in Rome. The next day Cesare invited his future brother-in-law to his apartments with the most manifest display of affection and the following day the Pope welcomed him together with Lucrezia in the presence of Ascanio, the Cardinal of Perosa and Neapolitan representatives.

Finally, an agreement had been made between King Federigo and the Pope, whereby the King would give Alfonso the Duchy of Bisceglie and the lands of Corato as security for Lucrezia’s dowry,
⁷
while the Pope would give her a dowry of 40,000 ducats.
⁸
It was also agreed that Alfonso should stay in Rome for a year and that Lucrezia would not be obliged to go to Naples.

Once again Lucrezia was a political pawn: her marriage to Alfonso was simply a stepping stone to the more important marriage of Cesare to Carlotta of Naples, which would give him a foothold in the Kingdom. Within a comparatively short time her connection with Bisceglie, like her marriage to Giovanni Sforza, would be surplus to her family’s requirements. She appeared happy, however, with her chosen husband, a goodlooking youth of seventeen. The marriage took place in private on 21 July in the presence of cardinals Ascanio Sforza, Juan Lopez and Juan Borgia. In accordance with custom a naked sword was held over the couple by Juan Cervillon, the Catalan captain of the papal guard, but the celebrations were held behind closed doors. Burchard, who would have been in charge of the ceremonies had they been public, recorded only that Alfonso contracted marriage with Lucrezia in the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico ‘and then carnally consummated the marriage’.

However, there was an insider account. The celebrations enjoyed in the Vatican with huge exuberance by the Borgia inner circle were described in detail by Sancia, sister of the bridegroom, and now known to be Cesare’s mistress. On Sunday 5 August a solemn nuptial mass was held in the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico, with the couple flanked by Sancia and Jofre. Sancia described Lucrezia’s magnificent dress at length; this stress on the richness of clothes and costly materials is a feature in every account of a period which laid such importance on
bella figura,
the display of beauty and wealth being considered an essential indication of the rank and importance of the person. Lucrezia’s robes included a rich silken skirt of camlet with sleeves studded with jewels and a long robe in the French style of golden brocade with a pattern of black thread and crimson velvet trim; her belt was studded with pearls and other jewels, she wore a necklace of large, fine pearls round her neck, her ‘very beautiful’ hair hung down over her shoulders, and on her head she wore a cap embroidered with jewels and pearls and a band of gold wrought and enamelled. Alfonso was also splendidly dressed in black brocade lined with crimson satin; he wore a cap of black velvet with a brooch given him by Lucrezia: a gold medallion with a unicorn as a device and a jewelled golden cherub. Lucrezia was attended by three ladies, and by Geronima Borgia, sister of the cardinal, and her household all splendidly dressed.

The company remained in the palace all day and feasted there until, at the twenty-third hour, the Pope sent his courtiers to escort them to a hall in the Vatican, known as the Room of the Pontiffs, where, with the Pope enthroned and with Lucrezia, Alfonso, Sancia and Jofre at his feet, the order was given for the ladies and gentlemen to dance. At Alexander’s command Lucrezia first danced alone and then with Alfonso. Afterwards they dined, with the Pope by himself at a high table, and at another Lucrezia, Alfonso, the cardinals Borgia and Perusa, the protonotary Capellan and Geronima Borgia. Sancia was given the signal honour of serving the Pope wine. Then the cardinals Borgia of Monreale and Perusa, with Don Alfonso, served the Pope’s table before themselves sitting down to eat. The highest ranking courtiers acted as pages and after dining, which took three hours, the Pope presented Lucrezia with a magnificent silver service and the cardinals followed suit with gifts of silver and jewels. After this the Pope and his party withdrew to the Borgia Apartments where Cesare had set up magnificent tableaux – a fountain richly worked with depictions of cobras and other poisonous snakes, while in another room there was a wood in which wandered seven mummers dressed as animals: Jofre, quaintly, as a sea goose; the prior of Santa Eufemia (Ludovico Borgia), brother of Cardinal Borgia, as an elephant; and other gentlemen of Cesare’s dressed as a fox, a stag, a lion and a giraffe. Cesare himself appeared as a unicorn. They were all dressed in satin according to the colour of the animal they represented and came in one by one, dancing before the Pope. At last Cesare asked permission to dance with Lucrezia, after which each of the mummers danced with the ladies. And so it continued until dawn was breaking when they had a collation served as before, and at sunrise the Pope ordered Lucrezia and Alfonso home, attended by all the company except Cesare, who remained with his father.