The Borgias (49 page)

Caterina hung on doggedly through three brutal weeks as ball after ball smashed into the walls of her
rocca
, which finally began to develop large cracks. Her spirits must have soared at reports that her uncle Ludovico il Moro was coming down out of the Alps at the head of an army, intent upon retaking Milan. The reports were true; the gold with which he had earlier fled Milan had provided Ludovico with ample funds with which to hire and equip a substantial body of Swiss mercenaries. If he moved quickly enough and was at all successful, Louis XII would be forced to recall his troops from the Romagna. Cesare would have no choice but to break off his siege.

Things did not work out that way. On January 12 Cesare’s bombardment finally bore fruit, opening a sizable hole in one of the walls of Caterina’s stronghold and allowing d’Alègre’s infantry to pour through. The hand-to-hand combat that followed ended with Caterina, seeing that defeat had become inevitable, attempting to commit suicide by blowing up her gunpowder magazine. A defective fuse foiled that effort, and she was taken prisoner by the French, her fortress falling into Cesare’s hands. He had to pay d’Alègre to hand Caterina herself over, regarding her as far too dangerous to be left in anyone’s custody but his own. Soon after, when he set off with his troops for his next objective, Giovanni Sforza’s city of Pesaro, he took his captive with him. By not only defeating the famed
virago
but stripping her of her cities, he had
catapulted himself into first place among the soldiers of Italy. Stories circulated of how he repeatedly raped Caterina after she was in his custody, and though they enhanced his reputation as an enemy to be feared, they are of dubious provenance. It is just as plausible that Caterina, who in the course of her career had more lovers than husbands, made her person available to Cesare in hopes of gaining an advantage. It is no less possible that the two did not become intimately involved at all.

Cesare was en route to Pesaro, which had already been abandoned by a frightened Giovanni Sforza, when a courier came galloping in with instructions for Yves d’Alègre to quick-march his troops back to Milan. Il Moro had reentered his old capital to the welcoming shouts of his former subjects, who after a taste of French occupation had decided—much like the Neapolitans in the time of Charles VIII—that the Sforzas were not so intolerable after all. D’Alègre’s men were to become part of the force that Louis XII was assembling in hope of saving his position. The speed of this reversal made Louis’s invasion seem as empty an achievement as his predecessor’s had been. It resurrected old questions about how wise the pope had been in allying Rome with France.

The Sforza resurgence, however, was short-lived. In March, with a decisive battle apparently impending, Il Moro found himself abandoned to the mercy of his enemies. The Swiss mercenaries who had made possible his return to Italy, called upon to attack the Swiss in the employ of King Louis, declared that doing so was out of the question. They turned on their heels and departed, leaving Ludovico face-to-face with his enemies without an army at his back. He became a prisoner, as did his brother Cardinal Ascanio. Together they were taken away to France, where Ludovico would remain in confinement for the rest of his life. Louis XII took custody of the child who would have been duke of Milan if not for Ludovico’s usurpation: the still only nine-year-old Francesco Sforza, grandson of Il Moro’s late brother the psychopath Galeazzo Maria. No doubt to keep him from producing more claimants to the ducal title, the boy was consigned to the Church and to a comfortable future as abbot of a French monastery of no particular importance.

The withdrawal of d’Alègre’s troops had brought Cesare’s first
impresa
to an unexpected, and from his perspective a deplorably premature,
end. He had to abandon the march on Pesaro. Leaving Imola and Forlì in the firm hands of a longtime associate, a ruthlessly tough veteran of the Spanish
reconquista
named Ramiro de Lorqua, he set out for Rome. Pope Alexander, who had ordered bonfires lit all around Rome upon learning of the capture of Forlì, now outdid himself, arranging an extravagant public celebration of Cesare’s arrival and modeling it on the “triumphs” with which the emperors of old had marked the return of conquerors. On February 25 the whole city was turned out: cardinals, bishops, ambassadors, and Rome’s noble families stood waiting to cheer as Cesare passed through the Porta del Popolo at the head of his shrunken and weary army. With him, a trophy on display, was Caterina Sforza. After refusing to sign away her son’s rights to Forlì and Imola, she was locked up in the Castel Sant’Angelo, where, so the story goes, her hair quickly turned white.

The pope conferred on Cesare the Golden Rose, an ancient honor usually reserved for royalty, and the coveted title
gonfaloniere
or standard-bearer of the Church, previously held by such masters of the military arts as Francesco Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro as well as by Cesare’s distinctly less deserving brother Juan.

Louis XII being now back in control of Milan and eager to demonstrate his generosity to faithful friends, Cesare was almost immediately able to begin planning a second Romagna campaign. Though still dependent on the king’s assistance, he was growing wary of it, having experienced at first hand how viciously uncontrollable France’s mercenaries could be and how quickly they could be withdrawn when Louis decided that he needed them elsewhere. Cesare began looking to the Vatican for more of the money he needed. With Alexander’s skeptical acquiescence—though the pope definitely wanted control of the Papal States, he was less confident than Cesare that the Romagna was the place to start and less certain that trading friendship with Spain for friendship with France made strategic sense—Cesare began drawing from the pontifical treasury sums that in time would become nearly insupportable.

For the moment, fortunately for Cesare, the papal coffers were exceptionally full, the reforms introduced by Alexander having by this time begun to produce both increased revenues and substantial savings. The revenues of the alum mines at Tolfa were continuing to accumulate
also, and Alexander had created a cash bonanza by declaring 1500 a jubilee year and promising special indulgences that were drawing pilgrims to Rome by the tens of thousands. Though he cannot be accused of neglecting other needs—in response to the Turkish threat Alexander was sending forty thousand ducats a year to the king of Hungary and paying for the construction and equipping of fifteen warships at Venice—good management and good luck were providing him with the means to help Cesare as well.

For Cesare especially, but for all the young Borgias, the early summer of 1500 was a time for basking in good fortune. Alexander issued a bull appointing Cesare vicar—lord in the pope’s name—of Imola and Forlì. News arrived from France that Cesare’s bride, Charlotte d’Albret, was expecting his child. There is no explanation of why Charlotte failed to join her husband in Italy. Louis XII may have found it advisable to keep her in his custody, if not quite as a hostage then at least as an enhancement of his leverage over the Borgias. As for Cesare himself, it was not in his nature to pine for any woman; the most famously beautiful courtesan in Rome, a Florentine named Fiammetta, had by this time become his principal mistress. On June 24, as part of the Vatican’s celebration of the Feast of St. John the Baptist, he put on a display of his bullfighting skills in the piazza of St. Peter’s Basilica, killing five bulls from horseback and a sixth on foot, severing the head of the last with a single blow of his sword. It should not be forgotten that even at this point, recognized though he already was as the most fearsome Italian alive and a rising political force in his own right, Cesare was not yet twenty-five years old. His most colorful and extravagant actions are generally best understood as expressions of sheer animal exuberance—the overflowing vitality of a gifted, ambitious, energetic, and burningly impatient young man.

The summer idyll of 1500 came to an abrupt and frightening end on the night of July 15, a date that marks the beginning of another of the darkest Borgia mysteries. Lucrezia and the duke of Bisceglie had returned to Rome from Nepi, and that night, upon departing the papal palace after dinner, Bisceglie was set upon by a gang of armed men. Whether they intended to kill him or carry him away is not known, but Bisceglie resisted at sword’s point and was gravely injured in the ensuing fight. The attackers fled when palace guards heard the commotion
and opened the gates. At Alexander’s instructions Bisceglie was carried to a room on the top floor of the new part of the papal palace known today as the Borgia Tower, and a round-the-clock guard was posted. Over the next five weeks, under the care of the pope’s own physicians and with Lucrezia and Sancia serving as nurses and guardians, he gradually regained his strength.

Rome boiled with speculation about whose work the attack had been, and why. This time Cesare came under suspicion almost immediately. Apparently there had been bad blood between him and Bisceglie; this would have been nearly unavoidable as Cesare and Alexander allowed their old friendship with Naples and Spain to cool and drew close to France instead. The grapevine continued to hum with whispers about how, with Louis XII’s army likely to be moving on Naples soon, Bisceglie’s connection to the Borgias had become tiresomely inconvenient.
Learning of this talk, Cesare declared cryptically that “I did not wound the duke, but if I had it would have been no more than he deserved.” Evidently Bisceglie himself believed Cesare to be guilty, though suspicion also focused, as at the time of Juan Borgia’s murder, on the Orsini. It was said that Bisceglie, in league with his family’s longtime allies the Colonna, had been plotting against the Orsini. This is no less plausible than any number of rival theories, including the one that had Cesare ordering the attack out of fear that Lucrezia’s happy marriage, and Alexander’s devotion to Lucrezia, would deter the pontiff from breaking with Naples. Or the suggestion that it was Bisceglie who had blocked Cesare from making Carlotta of Naples his wife, thereby incurring his hatred.

What happened next was even more shocking but considerably less mysterious. On August 18 Lucrezia, Sancia, and Bisceglie’s visiting mother briefly left the convalescing duke alone, either to attend to some matter of household business or because someone—possibly Cesare—had called them away. Upon returning and finding the door blocked by armed men, the women ran to the pope for help. When at last they were admitted to Bisceglie’s bedchamber, they found him dead, strangled, it would be said, by a Spanish soldier named Miguel de Corella—Michelotto to the Italians, a longtime friend of Cesare’s but just now coming to prominence as his most trusted and devoted lieutenant. No reason has ever emerged for thinking this account of the
crime to be untrue. Questions, however, remain.
Why
would Cesare have been so open in arranging the murder, in broad daylight and without any attempt at secrecy, of the husband of the sister whom, as his subsequent conduct would make it impossible to doubt, he loved more than anyone else? And does his responsibility for the murder mean that he must also have been responsible for the night attack on Bisceglie more than a month earlier?

The search for answers has always been impeded by rumor and uncertainty—by reports, for example, that not long before the murder Bisceglie had gone for a walk in the papal gardens, seen the brother-in-law who he believed had tried to have him butchered, fired off a bolt from a crossbow in an impulsive attempt at revenge, and sent Cesare into a murderous rage by doing so. Among students of the Borgia story are some who find it impossible to believe that Cesare had anything to do with the first attempt on Bisceglie’s life, others who find it impossible to believe that he did not. As for the strangling, here it is depicted as a cold-blooded act of political calculation, there as a crime of blind passion. When everything known about Cesare is taken into account, it would appear more characteristic of him to have killed for a purpose than to have been carried away by a momentary surge of wrath. Still, as noted earlier, he
was
young and capable of impulsive behavior.

The deepest mystery of all, assuming as we must that Cesare did have Bisceglie killed, is how his relationship with Lucrezia was not destroyed. If we could find the answer to that, it would take us to the heart of a connection that bound brother tightly to sister as long as both remained alive. The intensity of that connection was undoubtedly obvious to all who observed the two together and helps to explain why the allegations of incest that a bitter Giovanni Sforza first muttered when his marriage to Lucrezia was being dissolved took root and grew into a centuries-old legend of international reach.

Whatever the answers to these questions, regardless of whether Cesare at any point had second thoughts or felt a pang of remorse (neither thing is easily imagined), the murder and the furor that followed did nothing to diminish his impatience to return to action. He was poised to respond when, just days after Bisceglie’s body was laid to rest, it became known that preparations for Louis XII’s move on Naples were under way at last. This put a whole new train of events in motion. Alexander
and Cesare alike were quick to see that the situation was ripe for exploitation. It was Cesare, mainly, who set out to do the exploiting, pulling an uncertain pope along in his wake.

He had two great advantages in this situation. The first was the papal soldiery, which if added to King Louis’s own troops would increase the size of the French army by at least a third. If used to resist Louis’s advance, on the other hand, it could be a serious problem. The other was the power of the pope to approve, or withhold approval of, Louis’s claim to the Neapolitan crown. Without this, even if he succeeded in taking Naples by force, Louis like Charles before him would be a usurper with no proper grounds for demanding the loyalty of the people of Naples or recognition by the other Italian states.

The king’s need for the Borgias was therefore obvious enough, and his personal attachment to Cesare sufficiently well known, to have immediate impact. It caused the Venetians, eager to demonstrate their willingness to be cooperative, to confer on Cesare the honorary title
gentiluomo di Venezi
. In doing this they signaled that they had no intention of defending Pesaro, Rimini, or Faenza—all of them longtime Venetian protectorates—if Cesare moved against them. Just twelve days later, less than a week after the Bisceglie murder, a team of French commissioners arrived in Rome to lay out the terms on which Cesare could launch his next
impresa
and again receive French support. Louis was generous, offering Cesare the use of 7,700 fighting men and approving his plan to expand his signory, his lordship, across much or possibly all of the Romagna.