Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (46 page)

Even over nuns there was a certain rivalry between Lucrezia and Isabella. A pre-emptive jealousy on Isabella’s part prompted a mission by di Prosperi to visit Sister Laura Boiarda, whom Lucrezia had made abbess of San Bernardino, although, he admitted, nothing of interest was said, but that Sister Laura ‘agrees that she holds Your Excellency as her principal Lady and Patroness . . .’

Di Prosperi ceased his correspondence with Isabella in June 1513, resuming it after a gap of six months with two letters of 18 and 24 December in which he reports his return home. The correspondence only resumes fully in January 1517, so there is a three-year gap in his invaluable daily reports of the Ferrarese court. Lucrezia continued to correspond with Francesco, sending him private messages and sweetmeats; but her correspondence with Isabella has a gap between April 1513, when Alfonso returned to Ferrara, and May 1516, during which period Isabella, avoiding Mantua as much as possible, was constantly on her travels. No correspondence survives between Alfonso and Lucrezia between the years 1510 and 1518. During this period Lucrezia gave birth to three more children, one of them a daughter, Leonora, named after Alfonso’s mother, born on 4 July 1515, after yet another difficult pregnancy and delivery, as she told Francesco Gonzaga: ‘I have been very ill for ten days, very weak and afflicted with complete loss of appetite and with other difficulties but it has pleased God that this evening about the twenty-second hour I was seized by a sudden pain unexpected and unthought of because I thought I had not reached my term and gave birth. I am so happy and the little girl to whom I have given birth is well enough and it seems to me to have received from God one of those pleasing graces which his divine Majesty is accustomed to grant some meritorious person . . .’
¹⁷
The girl was to become a nun at Corpus Domini.

In April the previous year, Lucrezia had given birth to a third son, another ill-fated Alexandro. Two years later from Belriguardo, on 27 May 1516, she wrote to Francesco Gonzaga thanking him for remembering her ‘in this situation I find myself now’ and for sending her the
‘tartufoli’
(truffles) which she particularly appreciated. The reason for her unhappiness became clear some weeks later when, on II July 1516, she wrote to Gonzaga reporting her son’s death after a long illness:

The illustrious Don Alexandro, my last-born son, after having been ill for a long time of an infirmity unfamiliar to our doctors and has always been [afflicted] with ulcerations on his head and lately with a great flux for which there was no remedy, and thus he was forced this past night around the fourth hour to give up his blessed soul to God: which has greatly afflicted me and has left me in the greatest grief which could be expected, being a woman and a mother. It seemed to me my duty to give you immediate notice so that you are aware of all that befalls me, in adversity and prosperity: and I am sure that you will feel because of it the sadness due to the love and consideration which I bear you, and will feel compassion for the grief I feel which is immense: it only remains to pray God to give me strength to bear with fortitude this most grave sorrow . . .’

That same year, however, there was consolation in the birth, on 1 November, of another son, this time a healthy baby, who was named Francesco. Since there was no Francesco among either Alfonso’s immediate relations or Lucrezia’s, it is a tempting, although unlikely, thought that she might have named him after Gonzaga.

Lucrezia had now borne Alfonso three healthy sons but her history of disastrous pregnancies, miscarriages still- and premature births and sickly, short-lived children could have been caused by Alfonso’s syphilis. Unlike Francesco Gonzaga with Isabella, Alfonso maintained regular sexual relations with Lucrezia, resulting in repeated pregnancies which weakened her and eventually led to her death.

Lucrezia continued to keep in touch with her humanist circle, among them the poet Giangiorgio Trissino, with whom she had first become friendly in the summer of 1512 when he was in Ferrara.
¹⁸
She had consulted him later about the education of Ercole, writing on 18 September 1515 from Belriguardo to tell him that she had retailed their conversation to Alfonso who had been greatly pleased, and that they were both anxious that Ercole should begin his formal education as soon as possible. Could he possibly, she asked, without too much trouble to himself, find a tutor in grammar for the boy? She had not been able to write about this earlier because she had had no chance to speak to Alfonso, but she was also sending Ercole da Camerino to Ferrara to explain their ideas about it to him.
^I9
In November the recommended tutor, a Domine Niccolò Lazzarino, had still not arrived but, she told Trissino, who was apparently at the Emperor’s court, enclosing the tutor’s letter, he was hourly expected.
²⁰
In March 1516, she wrote to Trissino saying that she and Alfonso were anxious to consult him personally as soon as he could get to Ferrara.
²¹

Trissino, it would appear, had not been able to visit Ferrara, for Lucrezia wrote to him from Belriguardo on 1 June about how much they were hoping for his arrival to oversee Ercole’s education: ‘We advise you for your contentment that his preceptor until now could not be more satisfied with him, nor with greater hope of his gaining honours easily as we think you will have understood from his [the tutor‘s] letters.’
²²
That month payments figured in the Este accounts for an Ovid and a Virgil purchased by the tutor ‘Messer Nicol precepetore del Signore Don Hercule’ for his pupil.
²³
Two years later she was still in contact with Trissino and hoping to see him.

Meanwhile, Lucrezia had also been in touch with Aldus Manutius who had fled Venice for Ferrara after the defeat at Agnadello in 1509 and for the following four years had wandered the cities of northern Italy. Lucrezia was named executor in the will which he drew up in Ferrara in 1509, although not in a later version. At around that time, she also apparently offered support to establish the academy of intellectuals which had long been the printer’s dream but which he never realized.
²⁴
She encouraged Manutius to publish the edition of the poems of Tito and Ercole Strozzi, many dedicated to her, which eventually appeared in Venice in 1513. The book has a dedicatory preface by the printer to ‘the Divine Lucretia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara’ in which he refers to their common desire to establish an academy at Ferrara. Three years later, Ludovico Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso,
on which he had been working since 1506, was first published in Ferrara, with frequent, laudatory references to Lucrezia: ‘She shall ever grow in beauty, merit, fortune and good repute, just like a tender plant in soft earth . . .’
²⁵
She appeared in the poem as a marble statue supported by their mutual friends, Antonio Tebaldeo and Ercole Strozzi.
²⁶

Lucrezia was nearing thirty-seven, considered old by Renaissance standards, when Francesco was born. In late December that year, rumours reached her of the death of Jofre and these were confirmed by the beginning of January. Lucrezia was now the last surviving of Vannozza’s children: she had not seen Jofre since leaving Rome for Ferrara fifteen years earlier, and they do not appear to have corresponded; if they did, no letters have been preserved. After Cesare’s fall, Jofre had retreated with the rest of the Borgia faction to Naples where Sancia became the mistress of Gonsalvo da Cordoba, Cesare’s captor. By now thoroughly bored with Jofre, she had refused to have anything further to do with him. After her death, Jofre had subsequently married again, one Maria de Mila, who by her name was presumably a member of the family related to the Borgias. She bore him four children, and on his death his only son succeeded to the Principate of Squillace. Lucrezia received the news of her brother’s death from his widow and son, Francesco, ‘my nephew’. She wrote separately on 2 January to both the Gonzaga giving them the news. As might have been expected, her letter to Isabella was brief and couched in less emotional terms than the letter to Francesco. To the latter she wrote of the ‘unexpected event which has greatly afflicted me and has caused me the sorrow which might be expected. I am sure Your Lordship,’ she continued, ‘for the relationship between us and the reverence I bear you, will have compassion for me and for love of me will feel regret . . .’
²⁷
It is difficult to imagine that, apart from breaking one of the last links with her family past, Lucrezia really felt deeply bereaved by Jofre’s death.

There had been other, more significant, deaths on the international front. On 1 January 1515 Louis XII died. Despite having contracted syphilis, the King had married, on 9 October 1513, Henry VIII’s sister Mary; he was fifty-three and in failing health, she a beautiful girl of eighteen. His death was widely attributed to excessive indulgence in sex. Guicciardini accused him of ‘greedily making use of the excellent beauty and youth of his new wife, a girl of eighteen, and, not considering his own years and weak constitution, was taken with a fever complicated by disorders due to a flux’. Francesco Vettori, Florentine ambassador to Rome, wrote gleefully that King Louis had brought out of England a “‘fill” so young, so beautiful and so swift that she had ridden him right out of the world’.

Louis’s heir, François d’Angoulême, a member of the cadet branch of the family, succeeded as Francis I. At the age of twenty and in contrast with the tired old man Louis had become, Francis had the aura of a Sun King about him, as Guicciardini wrote:

The new King’s virtue, magnanimity, skill and generous spirit had aroused so much hope that it was universally admitted that for many years now no one had come to the throne with greater expectations. For he united the highest grace with the flower of youth . . . outstanding physical beauty, the greatest liberality, deep humanity withal, and a thorough knowledge of things. Together with his title of King of France, he assumed the title of Duke of Milan, belonging to him not only because of the ancient claims of the Duke of Orleans but also as included within the investiture made by the Emperor according to the League of Cambrai; thus he had the same desire to recuperate it as his predecessor. He was goaded to this undertaking not only by his own inclination but also by the youth of the French nobility, the glory of Gaston de Foix, and the memory of so many victories which had been won by recent kings in Italy . . .’

Towards the end of June 1515, Francis set out for Italy determined to recover all the possessions which the French had lost there in the last years of Louis XII’s reign. In July the Duke of Milan, Alfonso’s nephew, the Pope, the King of Aragon and the Emperor signed a League for the defence of Italy. Venice was openly on the side of the French against the Emperor and so, more circumspectly, was Alfonso, although he prudently refused all attempts by both sides to make him declare himself. On 1 September, Sanudo reported that Alfonso’s envoy had assured the Venetians that he was content to share fortunes with them and with the French:

He did not reveal any more and, to tell the truth, his excuse does not seem unreasonable. Not wishing to unite his forces with ours I should have thought that at least he should be willing to come here to meet us; but even this he has not wished to do and has made many excuses. I believe that in any case the aforesaid Lord Duke may not be a most cordial friend of Your Highness [the Doge of Venice]. All the same I believe that he will go to a good end with us and that he desires a prosperous success for the undertaking for his own particular interest because there is no doubt that if we lost he would also lose his state. We have had from His Excellency victuals and provisions and we have not failed to exchange with him good and cordial words.
²⁸

That month at Marignano the French defeated the fearsome Swiss army which had been defending Milan; Massimiliano Sforza was taken as hostage to France. Alfonso, it seemed, had backed the right side.

Lucrezia was once again left in charge at Ferrara during that autumn when Alfonso spent a good deal of time watching out for his interests in the French camp. Her principal role was to liaise with Venice, as Sanudo’s reports of almost weekly letters from her to the Signory demonstrate. Alfonso was away until mid December, accompanied by his nephew Federico Gonzaga, now aged fifteen, providing her with news of the French and the Pope and of Spanish troop movements. Within a short time another old player was removed from the field: Ferdinand of Spain died on 23 January 1516 leaving his kingdom to his grandson, the Archduke Charles of Hapsburg. Charles had inherited the dukedom of Burgundy from his father, while, as nephew to the Emperor Maximilian, there was a strong possibility he could also become his successor. As Ferdinand’s heir he inherited the Aragonese claim to Naples, always a source of trouble for Italy. Alfonso continued to sit on his fence at Ferrara, keeping in touch with the French and the Venetians but refusing openly to take sides. When both the Emperor and the King of France demanded he send them men-at-arms, Alfonso promptly sent his troops out of the city so that he should not have to do so. In June the two Duchesses of Urbino, the widowed dowager Elisabetta and her niece Leonora, arrived as penniless refugees in Ferrara, having been driven out by the Pope in favour of his nephew, Lorenzo de’Medici. Meanwhile, Leo held on to Modena and Reggio (despite Alfonso having paid him back the 40,000 ducats he had paid the Emperor for them) and had by no means given up hope of laying hands on Ferrara. As the year 1518 opened, although ostensibly a year of peace in Italy it held out continuing problems for Alfonso, who continued to tread a careful line between France and the Pope.