The Borgias (44 page)

It never happened. Pedro Luis died before it became possible, the place, year, and cause of his death being uncertain. Either not long before or not long after his death his mother Vannozza took the rest of her children—three daughters and three sons—to Rome. The two eldest girls, Isabella and Girolama, were married into the minor Roman nobility, their great-uncle Cardinal Rodrigo serving as their sponsor and helping to provide dowries. Juan, as the eldest surviving son not marked for the Church, inherited not only his brother’s ducal title and estates but his fiancée, the royal cousin Maria Enriquez de Luna. It can be assumed that he also underwent whatever education and training were deemed appropriate to the highest reaches of the nobility. The child Lucrezia had been remembered in Pedro Luis’s will with a bequest of eleven thousand Valencian ducats for her dowry.
Cesare, financially independent thanks to his benefices, continued his studies, enrolling at age fourteen in Perugia’s prestigious Sapienza and advancing two years later to the university at Pisa. However impressive his talents and attainments may have been at this early stage, nothing but the influence of Vice-Chancellor Rodrigo can explain his appointment to the bishopric of Pamplona in Navarre in 1491.

Cesare’s precocious advancement was carried to the furthest possible extreme when Rodrigo became pope: he was immediately given the see of Valencia, which Innocent VIII had raised to archiepiscopal status, so that that prestigious benefice had now been held by three consecutive generations of Borgias. When, a year later, he was named to the College of Cardinals, he was not only not a uniquely youthful appointee but not even the youngest of the dozen men given red hats at that time. The one flaw in all this, and in whatever great plans Pope Alexander had for Cesare’s future, was the boy’s glaring unfitness for an ecclesiastical career and his refusal to pretend otherwise. He rarely wore ecclesiastical garb and persisted in a way of life that, though it would have been accepted as natural in any lively and highborn young layman of the time, in a prince of the Church was nothing less than scandalous.

Long afterward, when propagandists for enemies of the Borgias began finding it useful to assume that Cesare had murdered his brother, it came to be taken for granted that he must have seethed with jealousy at having been shunted into the Church while the less able Juan was left free to make war, marry royalty, accumulate noble titles and great estates, and indulge in wild behavior without being pointed to as a disgrace to his vocation. But even if it was at about this same time that Cesare decided to reject the future that had been laid out for him, it does not necessarily follow that he had ever seen his brother as an obstacle to his escape. It definitely does not follow that he decided to take his brother’s life in order to get him out of the way. It does not follow even though we know him to be capable of murder.

As a cardinal Cesare devoted himself mainly to amusements: racing horses, bullfighting, carousing, and pursuing the fair sex. It was hardly to be expected that he would show any interest in the affairs or the needs of the Church—in the work of Alexander’s reform commission least of all. He was drawn to politics, however, and to the winning and using of power. This led him to become deeply involved in the life of his sister Lucrezia. Pope Alexander had already, in spite of his love for Lucrezia, repeatedly used her as an instrument of diplomacy, first betrothing her to two Spanish noblemen when she was still a child, then marrying her to Giovanni Sforza when she was only just barely more than a child. Cesare, in cooperation with his brother Juan while the latter was still alive and then on his own, carried her exploitation a big step further by
setting out to undo her marriage. His motives, so far as we can tell, were entirely political and entirely selfish.

This turned into a messy business. What Alexander or Cesare or both wanted—it is unclear who was the strategist in this matter—was a decree of annulment, a ruling that Lucrezia had never been validly married to Sforza and so was free to become someone else’s bride. The pope could have accomplished this by papal bull, simply declaring the marriage to be null, but he rejected this approach as insufficiently credible. He turned instead to the canon lawyers, suggesting that they might find it interesting to consider whether one or both of Lucrezia’s Spanish betrothals might have been sufficiently binding to leave her unfree to marry Sforza.

When the lawyers replied that this was an unpromising way of approaching the question, the Borgias decided to claim instead that the marriage had never been consummated because Sforza was impotent. The beauty of this approach was that it entailed an official confirmation of Lucrezia’s virginity, thereby fully restoring her value on the marriage market. The drawback was that it required Sforza to confess to something that any man would have found humiliating. He reacted in almost hysterical terms, pointing out that his first wife had died in childbirth and complaining that Alexander wanted to end the marriage in order to have Lucrezia for himself.

Thus was born the immortal legend of incest among the Borgias, with Lucrezia at its center. The story would expand over the centuries until Lucrezia was an international institution, a universal symbol of evil, not only a sexual wanton but a serial murderer, a poisoner of the most exquisite skill. In fact she was never anything of the kind. At the time of her final separation from Giovanni Sforza she was nothing more or less than a pretty, normally frivolous girl of about seventeen. She took a natural delight in her life as a princess, her beautiful gowns, and the attentions of the many young gallants who frequented the papal court. She took an equally natural pleasure in sharing center stage at that court with two close friends, her similarly pretty, distinctly less innocent sister-in-law Sancia and the stunningly beautiful Giulia Farnese Orsini, wife of the young lord Orsino Orsini, who was Lucrezia’s somewhat distant cousin by virtue of being the son, as noted earlier, of Adriana del Milà. (See
this page
for more on the alleged intimate relationship between Pope
Alexander and Giulia Farnese and an explanation of why that part of the Borgia legend is omitted from the present narrative.)

Though the years ahead would be heavy with dark events, and though she was quite human enough to be changed by the misfortunes that befell her, Lucrezia would mature and improve rather than harden with the years. If by the end of her life not a great deal would remain of the fun-loving child-bride she had been when first married, neither would she bear the slightest resemblance to the monstrous Lucrezia of legend.

Be all that as it may, when Cesare returned from Naples, he had changed radically. He had awakened to a whole new world of possibilities—above all to the possibility, for himself, of an entirely new life. While idling at Don Fadrique’s court, he had become aware that the king had a grown but unmarried daughter. This princess, Carlotta by name, was a descendant of French royalty on her mother’s side, had been raised in France virtually as a member of the king’s family, and was living there still. It had occurred to him that she was a prize worthy of a prince and that whoever married her would become, by doing so, princely. He decided that he wanted this Carlotta. What he had to do first was get himself out of the Church.

15

Valentino

If anything is certain in the story of the Borgias, it is that the man who became Pope Alexander VI was not weak and not a fool. Raised at an improbably early age to the second-highest position in the international Church, left to shift for himself when his uncle died just two years later, he not only survived but went on to flourish through the reigns of four very different, often very difficult popes. Finally winning election himself in the face of powerful and richly financed rivals, he spent his first five years as pontiff dealing with invasion, betrayal, rebellion, heresy, and murder. He emerged from each crisis, even the spirit-crushing death of his favorite nephew, with his vitality and buoyancy unimpaired and his stature enhanced. At age sixty-five, operating effectively at the highest levels of European power politics, he was putting on weight but otherwise remained the same cheerily easygoing, life-loving bundle of energy he had been at twenty-five.

All of which says more than anything else can about the power of
Cesare
Borgia’s personality, the force of
his
will. Because from 1498 onward, from the point where he made up his mind that he was not going to stay in the Church but instead was going to transform himself into a great secular prince, Cesare began reshaping the mind and will of Alexander to conform to his own. Ultimately he would be astonishingly successful at this, appearing at crucial junctures to reduce the pontiff to a mere instrument and in the process putting all Rome at the service of
his own ambition. It is necessary to remember just how formidable Alexander himself was in order to get some sense of just how much force the younger man projected.

Almost the last significant crisis of Alexander’s reign in which Cesare and his interests were not significantly involved was the climax of Savonarola’s story. In the aftermath of his confronting of Charles VIII at Poggibonsi in June 1495, even as half the French army withdrew beyond the Alps and the half remaining in Naples was destroyed piecemeal by Gonsalvo’s Spaniards, the friar had tirelessly predicted that in due course the king would return and do a proper job of purging Italy of its corruptions, including and even especially its corrupt pope. In this case as always, Alexander was indifferent to criticism of himself personally—it must be noted that even as his condemnations became almost insanely extreme, the friar never accused the pope of having mistresses or children—but the problems created by Savonarola’s preaching were more political than personal, and they were political in two ways. First, Savonarola’s embrace not only of France but of French ambitions in Italy was alarming to the members of the so-called Holy League, originally formed to force Charles to return home and surviving as an instrument for keeping him there. These members wanted Florence to break with France, join them, and become part of the deterrent to a second French invasion. They began to see Savonarola’s removal as the only possible way of making this happen.

Second, as Savonarola escalated his rhetoric, he was no longer merely calling Rome an evil place and the pope a bad man but denying the Church’s authority and Alexander’s right to the papal crown. He was proclaiming himself to be subject to no institution and to no one except God. This was more than shockingly bold in the Europe of his time. It was a direct challenge to the established order, a renunciation of that order, and easily seen as an invitation to chaos. Alexander found himself under growing pressure to respond. It came from the princes of Italy and the princes of the Church in equal measure.

What is remarkable is the restraint with which Alexander responded to the provocation and the pressure. He began, in July 1495, with a letter that, in unthreatening terms, directed Savonarola to come to Rome and explain his prophecies and preachments. When the friar replied that he was unable to comply because of illness and the mischief that
the enemies of Florence might commit in his absence, Alexander allowed matters to rest. In the months following, however, Savonarola not only continued to attack the pope from his pulpit but did so in steadily more extreme terms. In September Alexander wrote again, not to the friar this time but to the Dominican monastery of Santa Croce in Lombardy, informing it of a reorganization in which Savonarola’s San Marco convent among others was now under its jurisdiction and that the “certain Fra Girolamo” who was San Marco’s prior was to be ordered to stop preaching until he visited Rome to explain himself. Savonarola, when he learned of this, sent Alexander a letter that amounted, behind its verbosity and rather fuzzy diction, to a declaration of defiance.
For him to submit to the authority of Santa Croce, he said, would be tantamount to “making our adversary our judge.” As for a trip to Rome, that would be pointless because “it is now plain that I have not lapsed into error.”

By the final months of 1495 Savonarola was not only mocking the pope in his sermons but explicitly challenging the right of the ecclesiastical authorities to tell him to do anything. He announced that the vows of obedience that he had taken early in his career no longer applied because as God’s chosen messenger he was now on a higher plane than other clerics. It is of course legitimate to argue that Savonarola was behaving heroically, that his actions echo the earlier, similar courage of Jan Hus of Bohemia and foreshadow the later, more momentous rebellion of Martin Luther (who was, in 1495, an eleven-year-old schoolboy in Germany). Such arguments do not alter the fact that the nature and virulence of his attacks, especially when coupled with the wild enthusiasm of some of his followers, constituted too radical a challenge to be shrugged off indefinitely. Alexander’s forbearance was, under the circumstances, impressive. His attitude becomes all the more remarkable when one considers that states including Venice, Ferrara, and Bologna all regarded the friar’s preachments as an incitement to the French to invade and were demanding that he be shut up.