Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (28 page)

For the poet, unattached, ardent and living in the luxury of the Strozzi villa among the waterways and flat fields of Ostellato, twenty-five miles from Ferrara, there was no impediment to romantic dreams. But for Lucrezia, living in the enclosed circle of the court and constantly spied upon, life was more complicated. And in the distance, but always dominating the Italian political scene, were her father and brother. In his next letter written from Ostellato in late June, Bembo refers specifically to Lucrezia’s ‘vexations’ and ‘distress’ and ‘these present cares.’
¹³
It is unclear from this whether these may have been connected with Alfonso’s return to Ferrara (he had been away in May) or to Lucrezia’s own family situation.

At the beginning of 1503 Cesare’s fortunes, which seemed so bright, were actually on the cusp. Where his success had rested on his alliance with Louis XII, the King now blocked his path. Cesare had grown too powerful and Louis was unwilling to allow him to extend his dominion over either Bologna or, more particularly, Florence. Venice and the French-held Duchy of Milan obstructed his expansion northward; Cesare’s only real option was to turn southward. And, as always, the Kingdom of Naples loomed large in his calculations; here it was now Spain which was calling the shots. In a series of victories in April, the French in the Kingdom were routed by the Spanish forces under their brilliant commander, Gonsalvo da Cordoba; on the 13th Gonsalvo entered Naples. Alexander, Iberian at heart, had never really liked the French alliance, nor, rightly, had he trusted Louis. To the Bolognese envoy he made it plain that the French could not rely on the Borgias to win the Kingdom back for them: ‘We are resolved not to lose what we have acquired,’ he said, adding piously, ‘because we see that it is God’s will that the Spaniards have been victorious; and if God wills it thus, we must not wish it otherwise.’
¹⁴

Unlike his father, Cesare kept his counsel as he considered his future. As Machiavelli was later to write of him in
The Prince:
‘When the Duke had become very powerful and in part secure against present perils, since he was armed as he wished and had in part destroyed those forces that, as neighbours, could harm him, he still, if he intended to pursue his course, had before him the problem of the King of France, because he knew that the King, who too late had become aware of his mistake, would not tolerate further conquest. For this reason the Duke was looking for new alliances and wavering in his dealings with France . . .’ The first public sign of the way Cesare’s thoughts were tending came with the nomination of the new cardinals early in May: five of the nine were Catalans, either close relations or dependants of the Borgias. There was not one Frenchman.

Lucrezia naturally had her own sources of information in the Borgia camp, although it is unlikely that she was ever consulted by Cesare, now totally dominant in the partnership with his father. In February she had a new source of information in Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, recently returned from Rome where he had enjoyed an affair with Sancia, now once again unaccountably confined to Sant’Angelo by Alexander. There were rumours, as always with il Valentino, that Ippolito had fled Rome from fear of Cesare although it is unlikely that Cesare would have cared what Sancia did, powerless as she was but still his sworn enemy. Moreover, Alexander specifically expressed his delight at Lucrezia’s friendship with Ippolito: ‘She spends the night with Don Alfonso and the day with the Cardinal d’Este, who was with her all day and accompanied her wherever she went,’ he declared proudly to Costabili, adding that the three of them were ‘three bodies and one sole mind’.
¹⁵

Lucrezia formed a close alliance with Ippolito, as she had with all the Este brothers, a key factor in the dangerous situations which surrounded her. The first public sign of trouble came with the murder of the hitherto most trusted Borgia henchman, Francesco Troche. On the night of 8 June, Troche was strangled on a boat moored on the Tiber. According to Costabili’s account, Cesare interviewed the prisoner and then ‘His Excellency placing himself in a spot where he could see and not be seen, Troche was strangled by the hand of Don Michele . . .’ (Michelotto). It was all too reminiscent of the murder of Alfonso Bisceglie. Count Lodovico Pico della Mirandola, then one of Cesare’s captains, wrote in a letter to Francesco Gonzaga that Troche’s crime was to have revealed to the King of France the Borgias’ negotiations with Spain. As Troche was known to be pro-French he was now expendable and, with his intimate knowledge of Cesare’s affairs, positively dangerous.
¹⁶
Cesare then compounded the effect of this act of terror by executing at dawn on the same day a leading Roman nobleman, Jacopo di Santa Croce, whose body was exposed on the bridge of Sant’Angelo. No explanation for the execution was given, but since he had been arrested with Cardinal Orsini and the others at the time of Sinigallia and confined with them to the Castel Sant’ Angelo the probable reason was that Cesare suspected him of conspiring with the Orsini against him.

For Lucrezia, knowing Cesare as she did, and well informed through the Este envoys at every court, the future seemed perilous. The Borgias, father and son, had been raising huge sums for the coming campaign. In secret consistory on 29 March, Alexander had created eighty new official posts to be sold to candidates at 760 ducats apiece. Cesare himself had set the rates for the new cardinals’ nomination. Driven on by the fear of being caught in the coming clash between France and Spain, the Borgias resorted to poisoning wealthy victims, a means which was, as Guicciardini admitted, an Italian rather than a Spanish custom. For this reason Italians were wont to attribute the deaths of prominent people to poison whereas they were usually down to some virulent fever caused by food poisoning; the number of cardinals who died during Alexander’s papacy did not proportionately exceed the average number of deaths under previous pontificates. Cesare’s normal method of disposing with enemies was the Spanish garrotte, or swift strangulation. The method now used was probably
cantarella,
white arsenic, and one case – the death on 10 April of Cardinal Giovanni Michiel, Bishop of Porto and Patriarch of Constantinople – was almost certainly the result of deliberate poisoning. As soon as Alexander heard of his death, Giustinian reported, he had Michiel’s house plundered. ‘The death of this Cardinal gives him more than 150,000 ducats.’ In early July, Alexander issued a Bull conferring the vicariate of Vitellozzo Vitelli’s Città di Castello on Cesare and requested the Perugians to offer him their lordship in place of the Baglioni. Negotiations with the always impecunious Emperor Maximilian for the investiture for Cesare of Lucca, Pisa and Siena were well under way. Everyone north of Rome expected some lightning move by Cesare but as July wore into August, il Valentino had still not made a move. In reality, the ‘son of Fortune’ was in an agony of suspense. In Gaeta the French, under Cesare’s old companion-in-arms Yves d’Alègre, still held out against the Spaniards while in Lombardy a large French force was massing to march south to the rescue.

By mid July, as Cesare waited in Rome, the romance between Bembo and Lucrezia became ever more intense, on the poet’s side at least. He was in Ferrara, as ardent as ever and, it would appear, led on by Lucrezia:

I rejoice that each day to increase my fire you cunningly devise some fresh incitement, such as that which encircled your glowing brow today [presumably a jewelled head ornament perhaps representing flames]. If you do such things because, feeling some little warmth yourself, you wish to see another burn, I shall not deny that for each spark of yours untold Etnas [Bembo’s first printed work was entitled
De Aetna]
are raging in my breast. And if you do so because it is natural for you to relish another’s suffering, who in all justice could blame me if he but knew the reasons for my ardour? Truly I can do no sin if I put my faith in such a gospel and in so many miracles. Let Love wreak just revenge for me, if upon your brow you are not the same as in your heart.
¹⁷

Four days later, on the verge of leaving Ferrara, he was still burning with passion: ‘I am leaving, oh my dearest life, and yet I do not leave and never shall . . . If likewise you who stay were not to stay, I dare not speak for you, but truly “Ah, of all who love none more blest than I!” . . . All this long night, whether in dreams or laying awake, I was with you . . .’ He entreated her to read
Gli Asolani
which he was leaving with her and to discuss it with ‘my dear and saintly Lisabetta’. ‘My heart kisses Your Ladyship’s hand which so soon I shall come to kiss with these lips that are forever forming your name . . .’ After their parting, he could not resist one final note: ‘Not because I am able to tell you what tender bitterness enfolds me at this parting do I write to you, light of my life, but only to entreat you to cherish yourself most dearly . . .’
¹⁸

After he left, Lucrezia, whom he had suspected was unwell when he left Ferrara, suffered two bouts of tertian fever but recovered sufficiently to charm Ariosto who was, Bembo told her, ‘deeply inflamed by Your Ladyship’s surpassing qualities, indeed all afire’. Apparently she had also praised his
Gli Asolani
both in a letter to him and to Ariosto: ‘Messer Lodovico [Ariosto] writes to me saying that he feels there is no need for it [
Gli Asolani
] to be brought out and read by all the world in order to gain glory, for more than it enjoys already could never come its way . . .’
¹⁹
By early August he was back in Ferrara, very sick with fever and too ill to visit Lucrezia who bravely did him the signal honour of visiting his bedside and spending what he described as ‘a long while’ with him. ‘For the truth is your visit has altogether dispelled every trace of my grievous illness . . . and that vision alone and the merest pressure on my wrist had been enough to bring back all the health I had before. But to this you appended those dear sweet words so full of love and joy and the very quick of sympathy.’
²⁰

Even as Pietro Bembo wrote this, Lucrezia was about to face the most dangerous crisis of her life. On 11 August, her father had celebrated the eleventh anniversary of his elevation to the papacy but observers noted that he was far from in his usual spirits. He had been greatly depressed by the death on 1 August from fever (probably malaria) of his nephew Cardinal Juan Borgia-Lanzuol, Archbishop of Monreale (known as Juan Borgia ‘the elder’ to distinguish him from his younger brother of the same name). The cardinal had been excessively corpulent and as his funeral procession passed below the windows of the Vatican, Alexander, thinking of his own heavy body, had remarked, ‘This month is fatal for fat men.’ August was indeed a dangerous month to be in Rome – three of Alexander’s predescessors, Calixtus, Pius II and Sixtus IV, had died in the month of August and Innocent VIII at the end of July – and the August of 1503 was exceptionally hot. Alexander had remained in Rome because of the difficulties of the political situation, with Gaeta still holding out and a huge French force nearing Rome. Normally the papal court would have left the city for the cool of the Alban hills and to escape the threat of
malaria perniciosa
borne by the mosquitoes bred in the swamps of the Roman Campagna and the Tiber itself. The sickness struck without warning, accompanied by vomiting and bouts of fever which could raise a man’s temperature in a few hours to over 106 degrees Fahrenheit. On Saturday 12 August, Alexander was seized with a fit of vomiting and fever; Cesare, who had been planning to leave Rome on the 9th to try to come to terms with the French, fell ill the same day with the same symptoms.

The envoys circled the Vatican trying with little success to pick up scraps of information. It was two days before Costabili could even inform Ercole of the Pope’s serious illness – it was only on the 13th that he learned what had happened the previous day. The doors of the Palace were shut and no one was allowed out. ‘All this court is in considerable fear as to the illness of His Holiness and much is said,’ he reported. ‘All the same I try every way to find out the truth: but the more I investigate, the more I am told that it is not possible to understand anything for certain because the doctors, pharmacists and surgeons are not allowed out. But there is great suspicion that the illness is grave. The Illustrious Duke of Romagna is still, I understand from a good source, dangerously ill with
“due tertiane
” and “vomiting”.’
²¹
Two days later he could report only that the Pope seemed better and Cesare worse; the Spaniards had retreated from Gaeta and Cesare’s troops were near Perugia, but there was no news of the French. On 18 August, at the hour of vespers, Alexander died. Writing to Ercole that evening Costabili was still unaware of it, noting only that the Palace was locked and more heavily guarded than usual. Lucrezia was better informed: her favourite, Cardinal Cosenza, and her
‘Magiordomo’
(possibly the Sancho Spagnolo frequently mentioned as being in her service) were both in the Vatican and knew the truth. Not only had she lost her beloved father but, unless Cesare, gravely ill, could somehow extricate himself from the dangerous situation, the Borgia era would be over, with all the implications that that might have for her own future.

On 21 August, Bembo found Lucrezia prostrate with grief at the Este villa of Medelana, not far from Ostellato, where she had gone with her household to escape the plague then raging through Ferrara. He had gone there to offer her consolation but ‘. . . as soon as I saw you lying there in that darkened room and in that black gown, so tearful and disconsolate, my feelings overwhelmed me and for a long time I stood there unable to utter a word, not knowing even what to say . . . my spirit in turmoil at the pity of that spectacle, tongue-tied and stammering I withdrew, as you saw, or might have seen . . .’