Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (8 page)

Although Juan was now known to have consummated his marriage and his wife was pregnant, his extravagance continued to disgust Alexander who had showered him with money and obtained new titles and rich revenues for him.
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Alexander’s unholy love of money and property is revealed in this letter: ‘. . . your procurators have taken peaceful and expeditious possession in your name of the principate of Tricario, the County of Carinola, Claramonte and Luria and of all your other lands, which, according to their descriptions are lands of greater income even than the King offered, easily more than 12,000 ducats, fine, large and full’, he told Gandia gleefully before he burst out into the rage of a self-made man well aware of the value of money, over his son’s wasteful dissipation of his funds.

Gandia was by now homesick for his family and longing to return to Rome, as a letter to Lucrezia in the Valencia archives (written but apparently never sent) shows:

I feel a great desire to have news of you for it has been a great while since I received a letter from you and you can imagine, my lady sister, what a great joy your letters are to me for the love I bear you. So do me the favour of writing for my consolation, because already the Duchess my wife complains a great deal of you, that you have never written despite all the letters sent to you from here. She commands us to ask you to write, she is pregnant and in the seventh month. It seems two years since I left. I have written to His Beatitude to order my departure and from day to day I hope for this order . . . I commend myself to the lord of Pesaro, my dear brother, and similarly to Madama Adriana and Madama Julia . . .
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Probably around the same time (September 1494) he sent a similar letter to Cesare, imploring him to intercede with the Pope to send galleys to take him to Italy: ‘Each day seems like a year to me in the delay of those ships which His Holiness has written in recent days he will send soon . . .’

Despite the political situation, Giovanni Sforza was still in favour with the Borgias: in May, Alexander gave permission for Lucrezia, Adriana and Giulia to visit Pesaro for the first time. A collection of his private papers which remained hidden in the archives of the Castel Sant’ Angelo for over a hundred years reveals the Pope’s extraordinary dependence on ‘his women’, his love for Lucrezia and obsession with his beautiful young mistress. The party arrived in Pesaro on 8 June in heavy rain to a tumultuous welcome, as Lucrezia reported to her father, finding themselves provided with a ‘beautiful and comfortable house with all the furnishings and gaieties which could be required’.
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Adriana wrote the same day, praising Pesaro and the care with which its tactful lord attended to her every desire. Both women were, however, alarmed by the report brought by Messer Francesco (Francesc, in his native language) Gacet, a Catalan confidant of the dangerous position in which Alexander found himself in Rome, not merely from the plague but from the pro-French enemies (the Colonna, in particular) who were encircling him. ‘Messer Francesco will have informed you,’ Lucrezia wrote, ‘how we have all understood that at the present time [things] are going very badly [at] Rome, and that we are upset and sorrowful that Your Sanctity should be there. I implore Your Beatitude as much as I can to leave and if you do not wish to, take great care and diligence to guard yourself. And Your Beatitude must not take this as presumption but due to the great and cordial love I bear you and be certain that I will never be content until I hear frequent news of Your Beatitude.’ Adriana backed her up with expressions of concern that Alexander remained in Rome in the face of such danger, assuring him that he had nothing to worry about in Pesaro because ‘these ladies’ (Lucrezia and Giulia) were following his orders and were continually together. Orsino, who must have accompanied his errant wife to Pesaro, also recommended himself, she said, to His Lordship. One Giulia d’Aragona, a member of the numerous royal house of Naples, who accompanied the party, enlarged on the welcome and festivities at Pesaro where she, Giovanni, Lucrezia and Giulia Farnese, in robes of ‘pontifical splendour’, had danced among the crowds who were astounded by their magnificence. But she assured him that rumours of their total enjoyment were wrong, that both she and Lucrezia were counting the days until they could be with him again. She mentioned her brother, Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona, who was so pleased with the negotiations between the Pope and the new King of Naples that he felt ‘as if the Pope had once again made him Cardinal’.
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No woman, it seems, could ever write to Alexander without attempting to wheedle some favour out of him: four days later, she appealed to him to grant the benefice of the recently murdered Bishop of Rimini to her brother. In a postscript she hinted at some watching brief entrusted to her by the Pope, no doubt concerning the movements of Giulia Farnese, whom the besotted Pope was anxious should return to him as soon as possible. He addressed a long letter to Adriana asking her when the party intended to return and whether Giovanni Sforza would accompany them or remain in Pesaro. He was expecting them at the end of June or beginning of July and would himself return to Rome to meet them. He would expect Giovanni Sforza to remain in Pesaro to raise troops and defend his state, but did not think it advisable that the women should stay there in view of the number of troops wandering the country ahead of the French invasion.

In fact, the high-spirited Lucrezia was enjoying herself too much at Pesaro to write regularly to her embattled father. She excused herself on the grounds that she had been waiting for the letters she and Julia had just received, and because on Sunday the celebrated beauty Caterina Gonzaga had arrived and was still there. Caterina’s charms were already known to the Borgias: earlier that year one Jacopo Dragoni had written a humorous Latin poem to Cesare, the ‘Divine Caesar, Cardinal Valentia’, advising him to ‘lay siege to the town of San Lorenzo’, where Caterina lived with her husband (i.e. to seduce Caterina), and referring to her husband Ottaviano in contemptuous terms.
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It is not known whether Cesare took this advice. Lucrezia’s account of Caterina was dismissive:

Firstly, she is taller than Madonna Giulia, she has beautiful skin and hands and her figure is also beautiful but her mouth is ugly and her teeth very ugly indeed, her eyes large and pale [?grey], her nose is more ugly than beautiful, a long face and the colour of her hair is ugly and she has a distinctly mannish appearance. I wanted to see her dance and it was not a very satisfactory performance. In fact in all things she does not measure up to her reputation and in my opinion [compare] with the Lady whom I hold as my mother [Adriana] and Madonna Julia whom I hold as my sister . . .
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Lucrezia and Caterina did in fact become close friends, a connection which Caterina was eager to exploit in a letter written around this time to the Pope – ostensibly by Lucrezia but actually in Caterina’s hand and signed by both women early in July 1494 – in which they earnestly recommended Caterina’s husband, Count Ottaviano da Montevegio, to Alexander’s protection against his enemies.
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Caterina followed up this letter with another written on her return home to San Lorenzo praising Lucrezia to the skies for her spirit, intelligence and ‘attitudes of a true Lady’ and for her friendship. Her own sanity had been restored by the return of her husband from Rome when she had been led to believe he was dead. Now she asked Alexander for support against her brother-in-law, Roberto da Montevegio, and enemies who had taken her rents and were threatening to kill her.

Giulia Farnese had contributed her own description of Caterina’s charms in a letter to her ageing lover which produced a doting response:

Julia, darling daughter, a letter we received from you, the longer it was the more it was pleasing to us, so that it took more time to read, although to extend yourself in the description of the beauties of that person who could not be worthy to fit your shoes, we know how she behaves in all other things and does not do so with great modesty. And we know this to be a fact which you well know because everyone who writes to you says that next to you she appeared as a mere lantern near a sun, making out that she is quite beautiful, we thus understand your perfection, of which truly we have never been in doubt. And we wish that like us you recognize this clearly . . . and that no other woman is loved. And when you make this deliberation, we will acknowledge you as no less wise than you are perfect . . .
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As he knew that the three women (Adriana, Lucrezia and Giulia) read each other’s letters from him, he said, there was no need for further news.

Alexander was obsessed with his sexual passion for Giulia but he adored his daughter and was thrown into transports of panic at rumours going round Rome at the end of June that Lucrezia was dead, or her life despaired of. ‘Dona Lucretia, most beloved daughter,’ he wrote. ‘Truly you have given us four or five days of grief and grave worry over the bitter news that has spread throughout Rome that you were dead or truly fallen into such infirmity that there could be no hope for your life. You can imagine how such a rumour affected my spirits for the warm and immense love that I have for you. And until I saw the letter which you wrote in your hand, although it was so badly written that it showed you were unwell, I have enjoyed no peace of mind. Let us thank God and Our Glorious Lady that you have escaped all danger. And thus we will never be [truly] content until we have seen you in person.’ Giovanni Sforza ‘our most dear son’, had written to him complaining that the Sforza had given him neither the
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nor money, nothing but words. Alexander, having recently abandoned Milan, the French and the Sforza and come down firmly on the side of the Aragonese of Naples, suggested that Giovanni should follow his example and take service instead with the new King of Naples, Alfonso, whom he, Alexander, was shortly to meet. Cardinal Ascanio, he told her, ‘from suspicion and fear’ of King Alfonso, had left Rome.
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In the circumstances he was furious to learn that in mid July Giulia, accompanied by Adriana, had left Pesaro without his permission, to attend the sickbed of her brother, Angelo, at the family estate of Capodimonte. In fact, on reaching Capodimonte they found Angelo already dead, which, according to Alexander, caused Giulia and her brother the cardinal such distress that they fell sick of the fever. The Pope sent them one of his doctors but vented his rage and frustration on Lucrezia: ‘Truly Lord Giovanni and yourself have displayed very little thought for me in this departure of Madonna Adriana and Giulia, since you allowed them to leave without our permission: for you should have remembered – it was your duty – that such a sudden departure without our knowledge would cause us the greatest displeasure . . .’
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Lucrezia responded immediately to her father’s furious missive:

‘Concerning the departure of the aforementioned Lady [Giulia], truly Your Holiness should not complain of either my lord or myself: because when the news of the grave illness of Signor Angelo arrived, Madonna Hadriana and Donna Julia decided at all costs to leave immediately. We tried with every efficacy to dissuade them that it was better to await the opinion of Your Beatitude, whose licence would permit them to leave. But so great was their pain and their desire to see him alive that no persuasion was sufficient to keep them here. Indeed with supreme difficulty I persuaded them to wait a little, hoping that so their anxiety and determination [to leave] might abate a little. When the messenger arrived with the news that he was worse, no persuasion, reasoning or prayers could prevail since they resolved immediately to take horse and go there against every wish of my lord and myself. And the cause of it all was only the tenderness they felt at such a loss. And truly if it had not been forbidden to me I should have kept them company. Your Lordship can be certain that I felt cordial displeasure and extreme bitterness: both for the loss of such a lord whom I held as a good brother, and also because I was displeased precisely because it happened without the knowledge and will of Your Beatitude, and because I missed their amiable and sweet company. All the same, I have no power over the deliberations of others. They themselves can be witnesses that I did not fail in any way to try to keep them here. I beseech you not to take from this a bad impression of my lord or myself, nor to condemn us for something which was not my fault.
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Turning to politics, she commented with a sagacity unusual in a woman of her age, congratulating Alexander on the results to be hoped for from his meeting with King Alfonso at Vicovaro near Tivoli on 14 July and the prospects of an agreement with the Colonna.

Despite the optimistic note in Lucrezia’s letter, Alexander’s position in Rome was becoming more dangerous by the minute. His principal enemy and rival at the papal court, Giuliano della Rovere, had fled to France demanding the convocation of a General Council to depose Alexander on the grounds of simony. ‘If Cardinal Giuliano can be got to ally himself with France,’ the Milanese envoy Stefano Taberna had written on 2 May, ‘a tremendous weapon will have been forged against the Pope.’ On 17 March, Charles VIII had announced his intention of invading Italy, and the news that Giuliano had allied himself with him and his call for a General Council seriously alarmed Alexander. At the end of June, Ascanio Sforza had fled Rome to join the Colonna and succeeded in suborning them from their allegiance to Naples. Ascanio too now demanded a General Council to depose the Pope. Alexander, therefore, was threatened on all sides. At his meeting with King Alfonso of Naples at Vicovaro on 14 July, it was agreed that Virginio Orsini, head of the clan, should remain in the Roman Campagna to keep the Colonna in check, while the mass of the Neapolitan troops under Alfonso’s eldest son, Ferrantino, supported by their allies, the Florentines, should make their way north. None of this deterred the King of France: assured of the neutrality of Venice and Milan, he crossed the border between France and Savoy, marching southward.