Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (26 page)

‘Illustrious Lady and dearest Sister,’ he wrote:

I know nothing could be better medicine for Your Excellency in your present illness than the good news which I have to impart. I must tell you that I have just had information that Camerino will yield. We trust that on receiving this news your condition will rapidly improve, and that you will inform us at once of it. For your indisposition prevents us from deriving any pleasure from this and other news. We ask you to tell the illustrious Duke Don Alfonso, your husband, our brother-in-law, at once, as, owing to want of time, we have not been able to write to him direct.

Your Excellency’s brother, who loves you better than himself . . .

But this cheering news did not cure Lucrezia whose condition over the following days deteriorated. On 31 July, di Prosperi reported that she was very weak and the general opinion was that both she and her child would die. She suffered a severe nosebleed but seemed better to the extent that she expressed a wish to go to Belriguardo but this the doctors would not consider. Many of her ladies, di Prosperi reported, were also ill, and Madonna Cecharella mortally so. But by the time both Cesare and Alfonso rushed to her bedside on 3 August, she was well enough to lie dressed upon her bed where she received them, as she reported to Ercole three days later. Disguised as a knight of St John, Cesare was on his way with three other horsemen (including Troche and Remolins) to see Louis XII, with whom he had a secret and vital agreement, in Milan where the King was surrounded by Cesare’s enemies. Alfonso arrived shortly afterwards and, according to Lucrezia, the three of them enjoyed ‘pleasant conversation’ for two hours. The next day the two men left in the direction of Reggio.

Lucrezia, however, recovered only briefly at the sight of her brother and husband. She suffered a relapse and the fever and the ‘flux’ continued, although her brave letters to Ercole gave no indication of the danger she was in. Many of her doctors too were sick, Francesco Castello grievously so, while another, Francesco Carri, later died. By the beginning of September she was seriously ill, suffering fits of sweating interspersed with chills every day. Francesco Castello told Ercole that only giving birth would relieve her; the Bishop of Venosa wrote unsympathetically to Rome of ‘
accidenti di animo
’(fits of the spirit) and hysterical phenomena. On 3 and 4 September her fits were so severe that Castello could only recommend her to God’s grace; then, on the evening of the 5th, she was seized with a convulsion which caused her to arch her back, as screaming, she gave birth to a stillborn, seven-month-old daughter. Puerperal fever consumed her and the doctors despaired; two days later, at dawn on September, Cesare made a sudden appearance, having ridden furiously from the French court at Milan, accompanied by his brother-in-law the Cardinal d’Albret and thirteen gentlemen. Later that morning the doctors took the decision to bleed Lucrezia; to distract her Cesare held her foot and told jokes, even succeeding in making her laugh, but that night her condition deteriorated. Castello did not sleep, not daring to leave her, and in the morning she was given communion. However, as the morning went on she seemed better and an exhausted Castello told the inquiring di Prosperi that if things went on in this way until the next day he believed she would survive.
³⁷
Cesare, hoping for the best for his adored sister, left as swiftly and as secretly as he had arrived. Couriers rode furiously between Ferrara and Rome bearing the latest news of Lucrezia. In Rome on 8 September, Costabili reported that Alexander had heard ‘with great grief of the stillbirth of his daughter Duchess Lucrezia, but concluded that the grief would have been considerably greater if the child had been a boy’.
³⁸
Saraceni, who had also seen the Pope, added that ‘he much praised the prince Alfonso for his great tenderness towards her’.
³⁹
Ercole, however, as a letter dictated by Lucrezia of 4 September reveals, had not ceased to press her over his hopes for a cardinal’s hat for his favourite, Gian Luca Pozzi. Yet on the news of her stillbirth he had rushed to her side from Reggio where he had been conferring with il Valentino.

Lucrezia had failed in her duty to provide the Estes with a male heir and her sufferings were by no means over. On 13 September she had yet another relapse, so severe apparently that she felt her own pulse and exclaimed, ‘Oh good, I am dead.’ She added a codicil to her will which she had brought with her from Rome, to the benefit of Rodrigo Bisceglie. Rumours ran through the courts of Italy that she had been poisoned, the theory being that her failure to provide the Este with an heir had caused them to wish to rid themselves of the hated Borgia. This was unfair; not only had both Alfonso and Ercole expressed the greatest concern for her but Alfonso had vowed that, if Lucrezia survived, he would make a pilgrimage on foot to the shrine of the Madonna di Loreto. In the event, he changed his mind and went more comfortably by boat with Alexander’s specific dispensation from his original vow. By early October, Lucrezia was considered cured; while Alfonso left for Loreto, she took her court to the convent of Corpus Domini where, for three or four days, she intended to fulfil, out of the public eye, a vow made during her illness to wear only grey.
⁴⁰

Elsewhere in Italy, Lucrezia’s family was approaching the zenith of its power. As the year came to a close Cesare committed one more great act of terror which has resounded down history, dubbed by his contemporaries ‘a most beautiful deception’. No one knows whether Lucrezia, sick as she was in the summer of 1502, had been aware of Cesare’s plans to extend and consolidate his position in Italy, nor of the incredible risks he had knowingly run. The danger lay in his own success in the takeover of the lands of the Church, planned from the day he was made Gonfalonier. By the end of June 1502 most of the former vicariates north of the Campagna were in his hands, Camerino was about to fall and Sinigallia, a small town on the Adriatic, was marked down for destruction. Around Rome all the lands of the Roman barons except those of the Orsini, his allies for the moment, had been taken over by the Borgias. Within the Papal States, Cesare’s chosen area of operation, only Bologna, Perugia, Città di Castello and Fermo remained outside his control and, as such, obvious targets. Cesare’s lightning attack on Urbino had marvellously concentrated the minds of the lords of these cities – most of whom were paid captains of Cesare’s – on the fate that could befall them too. At a meeting at Lake Trasimene, shortly after Guidobaldo’s overthrow, between Vitellozzo Vitelli of Città di Castello and Gian Paolo Baglioni of Perugia (both of them Cesare’s captains), grand words were spoken about the ‘great betrayal’ (of Urbino) executed by the Duke (Cesare) and they began ‘to recognize his
marrano
faith more clearly’.
⁴¹

Once again the key for the Borgia advance was the French King’s desire for the Kingdom of Naples. Throughout July and August, while in Rome Alexander talked openly and ominously of the Orsini and Vitellozzo Vitelli, and Cesare, as secret and as elusive as ever, went hunting with leopards in the hills round Urbino, his face covered with thin silk against the flies, Francesco Troche was working to persuade Louis to abandon his protection of the Orsini and the Bentivoglio of Bologna in return for Borgia support for his Naples campaign. Isabella d’Este, far more politically acute and cool-headed than her husband, had wind of this and warned Francesco to be careful:

It is generally believed that His Most Christian Majesty has some understanding with Valentino, so I beg of you to be careful not to use words which may be repeated to him, because in these days we do not know who is to be trusted. There is a report here . . . that Your Excellency has spoken angry words against Valentino before the Most Christian King and the Pope’s servants . . . and they will doubtless reach the ears of Valentino, who, having already shown that he does not scruple to conspire against those of his own blood [a reference to the death of Gandia], will, I am certain, not hesitate to plot against your person . . . it would be perfectly easy to poison Your Excellency . . .
⁴²

Isabella herself was more cynical in her reactions to Cesare’s ‘nefarious’ crime against Guidobaldo and Elisabetta: the day before she wrote this warning letter to Francesco she had written to her brother Ippolito in Rome asking him to intercede with Cesare to help her acquire for herself two statues of Venus and Cupid which had been in the palace at Urbino. Cesare, who was in the process of packing up all Guidobaldo’s treasures, including his father Federigo’s celebrated library, and sending them to the Rocca di Forli, instantly obliged, sending a special messenger to deliver the statues to the cupidinous Isabella.

Cesare’s unexpected arrival at the King’s court at Milan and the ostentatiously friendly welcome accorded him by Louis, frightened his enemy lords gathered there. Even Francesco Gonzaga who, on the day of Cesare’s arrival, had unwisely boasted to the Venetian envoy that he would fight a hand-to-hand duel with ‘that bastard son of a priest’, hastened to make his peace with il Valentino. ‘Today we have caressed and embraced each other, offering each to the other as good brothers, and thus together with the Most Christian Majesty we have spent all this day dancing and feasting . . .,’ he reassured Isabella.

Cesare’s next objective was to be the Bentivoglio, the Este in-laws and rulers of Bologna, another papal vicariate. While Cesare laid plans for the next campaign, in Rome Alexander was intent on his long vendetta to avenge the death of Juan Gandia. On 25 September, Giulio Orsini told him to his face that the French had warned Cardinal Orsini at Milan that it was the Pope’s intention to ruin the house of Orsini. The next day the clan gathered for a family conference at Todi which could not bode well for the Borgias. This was followed by a meeting at Cardinal Orsini’s castle of La Magione, attended not only by the principal members of the Orsini family (one of whom, Paolo, was in Cesare’s employ), but a powerful group of Cesare’s captains who feared for their states, namely Vitellozzo Vitelli of Città di Castello, Oliverotto of Fermo and Gian Paolo Baglioni of Perugia, while the lords of threatened or surrendered cities – Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Giovanni Bentivoglio and Pandolfo Petrucci of Siena sent representatives. Baglioni warned the conspirators that if they did not take preventive action against il Valentino they would be ‘one by one devoured by the dragon’. The situation was fraught with danger for Cesare: on 7 October the revolt against him of the key fortress of San Leo in Urbino jolted the men at La Magione into action and on the 9th a League was signed against Cesare.

Machiavelli was at Imola with a Florentine delegation to Cesare when the news of the League of La Magione arrived. He had the support of the King of France, Cesare told him, boasting that ‘events would show what kind of men they are and who I am’. He moved swiftly, raising troops and negotiating separate agreements with his conspiring captains who even agreed to help him regain Urbino. Guidobaldo, who had returned to Urbino following the revolt of San Leo, scarcely had time to gather up the few possessions Cesare had left him before going on the run again, this time to Venice. He also moved on Camerino, where the eighty-two-year-old Giulio Cesare Varano was strangled and his lordship then bestowed as a duchy by Alexander on his son, Giovanni Borgia. He made separate agreements with the Bentivoglio, Orsini and the other captains, all of whom agreed to continue fighting for him. Machiavelli sized up the sinister situation with his usual perspicacity:

As to the suggested understanding . . . I do not augur well of it. For when I consider the . . . parties concerned, I see on the one hand Duke Cesare, vigorous, courageous, confident in his future, blessed with exceptional fortune, backed by the favour of the Pope and King . . . Confronting him, we have a group of lords who, even while they were his friends, were in anxiety for their possessions, and fearful of his growing power; and now, having thus injured him, and become his declared enemies, naturally more defensive still. So that I fail to understand how, on the one part, such injury can be expected to find forgiveness . . .
⁴³

But Machiavelli, acute observer though he was, failed to penetrate the secrecy of Cesare’s intentions before il Valentino rode out of Imola in heavy snow to spend Christmas at Cesena, the capital of his province of Romagna. There, on Christmas morning, people were shocked to see the decapitated body of Cesare’s former Governor of the Romagna and long-standing follower, Don Ramiro de Lorqua, displayed in the piazza, his black-bearded head impaled on a lance beside it. The ostensible reason given for his death was that Ramiro had been demoted by Cesare as a result of his unpopular treatment of the people of the Romagna and was being made an example of; but the real reason for his execution, as Alexander confessed later in Rome to the Venetian envoy, was that Cesare considered him a traitor for plotting with the conspirators against him. Once again it was an effective, deliberate act of terror. Cesare knew that the time had come for the final round in the contest with his
condottieri
and had already set the stage at Sinigallia, which his captains had agreed to take in his name from Guidobaldo’s sister, Giovanna, who ruled as regent in the name of her son, Giovanni Maria della Rovere.

On 26 December, Cesare set off with his personal guard down the Via Emilia to meet his captains there, having sent small bodies of troops southward to mislead the conspirators into underestimating the strength of his forces. He had ordered them to withdraw their troops from the town so that he could quarter his own guard there, and that all but one of the gates should be locked. Outside the town the
condottieri
came to meet him, nervously surprised to see that he was wearing full battle armour although fighting was not expected. Cesare greeted them cordially, riding with them into Sinigallia past the drawn-up lines of his heavy cavalry. Behind them the gates were quietly closed. Nervous but unsuspecting the conspirators accompanied Cesare into a house specially selected for the purpose by Michelotto on the pretext of a meeting. There the conspirators were seized as they sat in their chairs round a table, their hands bound behind them. At two o’clock on the morning of New Year’s Day, Oliverotto and Vitellozzo, seated back-to-back on a bench, were garrotted on Michelotto’s orders. Cesare took the three Orsini – Paolo (father-in-law of Geronima Borgia), Francesco, Duke of Gravina (once considered a possible husband for Lucrezia) and Roberto – with him to meet a similar fate on the road to Rome, strangled at the castle of Sarteano on 18 January 1503. As he left, Cesare caught sight of Machiavelli. ‘This,’ he told him, ‘is what I wished to tell at Urbino, but I never trusted the secret to anyone, thus the occasion having come to me, I have known very well how to use it . . .’ In Rome, encouraged by Cesare’s success, Alexander arrested the aged Cardinal Orsini along with other family connections, including Rinaldo Orsini, Archbishop of Florence, and sent them to Sant’Angelo.