The Borgias (50 page)

The campaign that Cesare was preparing was going to be hellishly expensive—all the more so because he had made it his policy, from the point at which he first became a commander of troops, not only to pay and equip his men well but also—what was most unusual—always to pay them on time. Pope Alexander’s main role was simply to cover the costs—to funnel from the papal treasury the sums required to keep Cesare supplied with thousands of well-trained, well-equipped, and satisfied professional fighters. It is commonly said that in late September the pope gave his income a onetime boost of 120,000 ducats by selling, with the terms negotiated by Cesare, twelve seats in the College of Cardinals. In fact only ten cardinals were appointed at that time, and their identities make it doubtful that fund-raising was the primary reason for
their promotion. Three of the ten were Spaniards, among them one of the Borgia Lanzols and a former teacher of Cesare’s. Among the six Italians were Alexander’s physician and a brother of the Gian Giacomo Trivulzio who as commander of Louis XII’s attack force had driven Ludovico Sforza out of Milan. Like the three appointments of six months earlier, which had conferred red hats on two Spaniards and a brother of Cesare’s wife, most of these men were more capable of tightening Borgia control over the Sacred College and winning favor with the kings of France and Spain than of paying great sums for their new rank. It is clear in any case that Cesare was left free to select the new cardinals, and that his choices, even if not made for cash, had more to do with politics than with the merits of the individuals so favored. He was, not to put too fine a point on it, packing the college with cronies.

The ease with which Cesare’s slate of nominees was approved by the College of Cardinals, normally so opposed to attempts to increase its membership, shows how powerful he now was politically, and perhaps how feared. The same thing was shown again when emissaries arrived from the Romagnese city of Cesena and two of its neighboring towns and meekly begged Cesare to condescend to become their lord, their
signore
. The populations of these places were in effect giving themselves to him, seeking to spare themselves unpleasantness or worse by saving him the trouble of having to use force. In granting their petitions, Cesare substantially strengthened his position in the region between Bologna and the Adriatic coast without so much as leaving Rome.

Further gains came quickly and with almost equal ease. When on October 2 Cesare embarked on his second
impresa
, he marched out of Rome at the head of an army of some ten thousand men. Waiting to join him in the Romagna was a force three-quarters that size provided by Louis XII. This was a terrifyingly large number of troops by the standards of the time, and Cesare made himself all the more frightening by telling no one what he intended to do. Florence felt threatened, all the more so because a delegation it had sent to Louis XII’s court—one of its members was a young civil servant named Niccolò Macchiavelli—had thus far not succeeded in securing either an alliance or assurances of protection. Even Bologna with all its wealth and power felt threatened, as did such comparatively minor states as Siena and
Mantua. Those even smaller were engaged in a desperate search for potent allies and finding distressingly few. The great duchy of Milan, which under the Sforzas would have been happy to bring its neighbors under its protection in hope of turning them into dependencies, was now an instrument of France and therefore part of the threat. Venice, still mired in its war with the Turks, could not afford to offend, never mind resist, France and Rome combined.

Cesare moved quickly and had startling success. His despised former brother-in-law Giovanni Sforza, alone since the fall of his cousins Ludovico il Moro and Caterina and mindful that nothing could induce his resentful subjects to risk themselves on his behalf, fled Pesaro again. He offered to sell the city to Venice and learned that Venice was not interested at any price. It was much the same with Rimini, twenty miles farther up the coast: Roberto Malatesta’s son Pandolfo departed in haste after finding it impossible to rally a defense. When a bishop sent by Cesare arrived to demand Rimini’s submission, its citizens hurried to welcome him.

The only place to offer resistance was Faenza, a small but thriving city midway between Caterina Sforza’s former strongholds of Imola and Forlì. Its location made it a prize that Cesare needed to complete his control of the Via Emilia. Long the domain of the Manfredi family, Faenza in 1500 had as its lord the eighteen-year-old Astorre Manfredi, a charismatic figure who spurned the demands of Cesare’s envoys and was supported by the people of the town. Cesare, whose capture of Pesaro had added twenty cannons to his already considerable strength in artillery, brought Faenza under siege on November 10. A long, hard struggle appeared to be in the offing, but Cesare had sufficient resources to attack other targets while proceeding with the tedious business of reducing Faenza’s
rocca
to rubble.

On November 11, however, another stunning development rearranged the political landscape yet again. Those two old rivals Ferdinand of Spain and Louis of France, already bound together in a fragile truce of convenience, now agreed via the Treaty of Granada to divide the kingdom of Naples between them. Louis was to get Il Regno’s northern provinces including the capital city and with it the Neapolitan crown. Ferdinand’s share for turning on his cousin Don Fadrique and recognizing Louis’s right to Milan would be the southern provinces of
Apulia and Calabria. It was a sensible enough arrangement as far as it went. Louis could march his troops down the peninsula from Milan without having to set foot on territory claimed by Spain. Ferdinand would be able to move troops into his part of the sundered kingdom from nearby Sicily, again without risking collision with his new partner in crime. Each got the satisfaction of knowing that he would soon be master of half of Naples without having to fight the other.

Much like the earlier arrangement by which France and Venice agreed to share Milan’s holdings on the Lombard Plain but on a larger scale, this deal created a combination so overwhelmingly powerful that all the states of Italy could have no hope of resisting it even if they somehow managed to unite. It removed any possibility that Naples—and Italy—might be saved by playing the two great powers off against each other. Thus it stripped Alexander of any lingering hope of impeding Louis as he had earlier helped to undo Charles VIII. Under these new circumstances a refusal to recognize Louis as king of Naples would have been not only an empty gesture but a potentially suicidal one. The only hope for an autonomous Italy lay in the inherent instability of the alliance. It required two proud, ambitious, and shrewd monarchs, hardened cynics who had never trusted each other and were obviously not going to begin doing so now, to share a great prize that neither really thought he should have to share with anyone. But all this was going to take time to play itself out. In the near term Naples as an independent state was doomed, and no one could do anything to save it.

The certainty that he would soon be on his way to Naples focused Louis XII’s attention on central Italy with new intensity. It brought home to him the importance of securing the hundreds of miles separating Milan from Naples—miles over which he was going to have to move his troops. Obviously he wanted the states that lay along his path to be incapable of opposing him if not positively friendly, and the surest way to achieve that was to make them dependent. This required keeping any of them from becoming strong enough to act independently, and all of them divided against one another. From this point forward, these were the considerations that shaped the French king’s dealings with the Borgias. He wanted the use of the papal army, and he wanted no trouble from the Vatican, but from now on there would be strict limits to how much he was willing to pay. And if he found Cesare more
appealing than the other princes of Italy, he also understood that allowing Cesare to grow too strong could be a painfully costly mistake.

The king’s next actions followed from these premises. After months of ignoring Machiavelli and his fellow Florentine envoys, Louis suddenly announced not only that he was putting Florence under his protection but that he would assist it in bringing rebellious Pisa back under its control. Cesare is not likely to have been terribly disheartened to be told that Florence was now off limits. The city had never been more than a distantly long-term possibility for him, and the French king’s prohibition gave him an unarguable reason to refuse the demands of some of the
condottieri
he had hired for the Romagna campaign, especially the cousins Paolo and Giulio Orsini and Paolo’s son-in-law Vitellozzo Vitelli, lord of Città di Castello. These men had blood connections to the Medici and profound contempt for the republican government that had sent the Medici into exile, and they had been pressing Cesare to begin his new
impresa
with an attack on Florence. They accepted this new proscription grudgingly, having no real interest in Cesare’s plans for the Romagna and feeling absolutely no loyalty to Cesare himself. Vitelli in particular was a worrisome character. Even more murderous than most warlords, but also one of the most skillful and experienced soldiers in Italy, he was consumed with hatred for the Florentine republic. He had made its destruction practically the central purpose of his life, and in pursuit of that goal he was constantly making trouble. He was not likely to stop doing so regardless of what the king of France had to say.

The great city of Bologna was more relevant to Cesare’s plans than Florence. Unlike Florence it was not separated from his possessions in the Romagna by the Apennine Mountains, with their dauntingly high passes, and its size and wealth and position at the northwestern terminus of the Via Emilia made it a perfect prospective capital for the principality he was in process of creating. He had in fact coveted Bologna since stopping there at the start of his first
impresa
in 1499 and seeing for the first time what an impressive place it was. Its resident tyrant, Giovanni Bentivoglio, saw the danger immediately. Louis XII and Cesare between them had broken one branch after another of his extended family. His wife was a Sforza, a cousin of Ludovico il Moro, Caterina the
virago
, and Giovanni the displaced lord of Pesaro. One of his daughters
was married to the Pandolfo Malatesta from whom Cesare had taken Rimini, and another was the mother of young Astorre Manfredi, still besieged at Faenza. Bentivoglio would have gone to his grandson’s assistance if not forbidden to do so by Louis XII.

Whatever plans Cesare may have had for advancing on Bologna had to be abandoned when Louis declared that he was taking it, like Florence, under his protection. This was another astute move by the French king. He turned not only Florence but now Bologna as well into client states, narrowing the options of the Borgias by doing so. Venice, if not nearly as dependent as Florence and Bologna, was also not a problem: it remained in no position to risk offending France. The Venetian
signoria
considered itself fortunate to have been allowed a share of the spoils from Louis’s conquest of Milan in spite of having contributed little to the success of his campaign. It knew that the king could strip it of its winnings whenever he chose. Fear of France had obliged Venice to yield without complaint when Cesare moved against Pesaro and Rimini, though it had long regarded both cities as within its rightful sphere of influence, Louis having made it known that he would not be pleased by an attempt to defend either place.

Milan, Florence, Bologna, Venice: four of the most important entities in northern Italy, and all now either belonging to Louis or obliged to do his bidding. And all, in consequence, were now closed to the Borgias, as was Naples as well. Alexander and Cesare, unless they resigned themselves to settling for the status quo, were going to have to work around them.

Background
 
 VENICE, SERENE NO MORE

IT IS A MARK OF HOW GREATLY THE REPUBLIC OF VENICE DIFFERED from Italy’s other major city-states that it alone produced neither a legendary dynasty—scarcely a dynasty of any kind, actually—nor a single leader whose name anyone not a specialist in Italian history would be likely to recognize.

Florence had its Medici, Milan its Visconti and Sforza dukes, Naples the improbably varied monarchs of the House of Aragon, and Rome the immortally notorious Renaissance popes—fabled figures all. But these epic figures had no counterparts in Venice, which nevertheless, in the course of centuries of practically anonymous collective leadership, turned itself into a power as important as any in Europe or the Mediterranean world.

What makes this all the more remarkable is that whereas Naples and Milan—never mind Rome—had histories reaching back millennia, and Florence was a creation of the Roman Empire, Venice didn’t even come into existence until after the empire collapsed. The fall of Rome in fact led almost directly to the founding of Venice—to its profoundly unpromising beginnings in a place where, under ordinary circumstances, no one could ever have wanted to live. It was in the fifth century, with Vandals and Goths and Huns bringing mayhem down out of the north, that a scattering of refugees found themselves driven by desperation to settle on a cluster of tiny islands and barren mudflats in a remote lagoon near the northwesternmost corner of Italy’s Adriatic coast.