BORGIAS PT 2: THE DEATH OF THE BORGIAS

Alexander had little time to gloat over his triumph over Savonarola. He himself was stunned by the murder of his beloved eldest son Juan, the Duke of Gandia. Juan’s corpse had been dragged from the Tiber the morning after a Borgia family dinner in the summer of 1497. The young man had been stabbed repeatedly. Theft was ruled out as a motive, as Juan’s purse with a large sum in gold was found on the body. Although the identity of the killer was not confirmed, suspicion passed between a number of those who knew him, before settling upon his younger brother Cesare, the last person with whom Juan had been seen alive.

     

The Pope himself is said to have suspected Cesare of the fratricide, but out of fear of his own calculating and ruthless son, did nothing. ‘Alexander was forced to acquiesce in the murder of his best-loved son, the Duke of Gandia, (Juan) since he himself lived in hourly dread of Cesare.’11

     

Worse in many ways for Alexander, he now needed Cesare. He had preferred Juan to the younger Cesare, who, resenting a perceived lack of paternal affection, had fashioned himself as cool and aloof, habitually dressed all in black. But the aging Pope had little choice but to turn now to Cesare, whose diplomatic and military skills had already been seen, and upon whose practiced brutality he would increasingly come to rely.

     

Dispatched as Alexander’s envoy to the newly crowned Louis XII of France, Cesare capped the success of his mission by his marriage to Charlotte d’Albret, sister of the King of Navarre and daughter of the Duke of Guyenne. In the process he gained the Duchy of Valentinois, becoming Cesare Borgia of France, and known throughout Italy as Duke Valentino. His close relationship with Louis XII then allowed Cesare to muster French troops for a scheme  he and his father had hatched, to annexe the Papal States in a military campaign through the cities of central Italy.

     

At the close of the fifteenth century, the Papal States were hemmed in by powerful neighbours - Venice, Naples, Milan, and France itself - as well as by prosperous city-states such as Florence and Bologna. But there was a jigsaw of smaller cities and principalities to Rome’s north and south held by the petty princes of the Italian nobility, and it was to bolster their strategic position that the Borgias, with the aid of French troops sent by Louis, set about reinforcing the Papal States by creating the neighbouring state of Romagna.

     

Cesare’s campaign, akin to a fifteenth century blitzkrieg, saw forced marches and surprise attacks, with city after city besieged and falling, some without a fight due to Cesare’s famous skills at negotiation and his vaunted military might, and in fear of the consequences of doing otherwise. Those who did resist, such as the imperious and cultured Caterina Sforza in Forli, saw their battlements breached and treasuries plundered. Cesare is said to have raped the captive Caterina herself, and kept her as a concubine until she managed to escape his clutches and flee.

     

His victories became the stuff of terrifying legend. After the fall of the city of Capua, with the final attack led by Cesare on horseback, its citizenry were raped and butchered in the streets. ‘Women, as usual, suffered the most with the inevitable rape preceding murder. Thirty of the most beautiful were captured and sent to Rome, Christians sent to the seat of Christendom as though to the court of a pagan prince. It was a Frenchman who recorded this incident, leaving it to Italian writers to elaborate it into a Herculean myth whereby Cesare took the women into his personal harem.’12

     

By now Alexander and Cesare had decided that Lucrezia’s second marriage to a Neapolitan noble, Alfonso, Duke of Bisceglie, was inconvenient for their ongoing alliance with France. In the midsummer of the year 1500 Alfonso was attacked and stabbed on the steps of Saint Peter’s, and left to die. One eyewitness reported the assailant was Cesare Borgia. When a few days later  Alfonso was strangled in his bed, the task was said to have been done by Cesare's chief fixer, Don Michelotto, although other accounts had Cesare attending personally to his brother-in-law. Lucrezia had apparently loved her second husband, but this carried no weight with her father and brother. After a time of mourning, during which Cesare paid her close fraternal attention, Lucrezia was deemed adequately recovered for her next assignment, marriage to Alfonso D’Este, the powerful Duke of Ferrara, whom she wed in 1501.

     

The mere mention of the “satanic” Cesare had become enough to freeze hearts up and down the boot of Italy. ‘The manner in which Cesare isolated his father, murdering brother, brother-in-law, and other relations or courtiers, whenever their favour with the Pope or their position in any other respect became inconvenient to him, is literally appalling.’13

     

The plans of Cesare and Alexander for the Romagna suffered a severe setback in 1502 with the Revolt of the Condottieri, the warlords and mercenaries of Cesare’s campaign of conquest. Hearing rumours of a possible weakening of the French king’s allegiance to Cesare, and that perhaps their master might not much longer be the force he had been, the condottieri conducted their own “freelance” assault upon Bologna, which embarrassed Cesare and eventually brought him into direct conflict with many of his long-time comrades in arms.

     

The young Niccolo Machiavelli, Secretary of State of the Florentine Republic, had by then spent considerable time with Cesare, and liking what he saw, joined his campaign in October of 1502, becoming an eyewitness to the vanquishing of the condottieri. The author of The Prince, the little handbook of treachery traditionally said to be inspired by Satan (though in fact inspired at least in part by Cesare Borgia), was described by a contemporary as:

     

‘Of middle height, slender figure, sparkling eyes, dark hair, rather a small head, a slightly aquiline nose, a tightly closed mouth; all about him bore the impress of a very acute observer and thinker, but not that of one able to wield much influence over others. He could not easily rid himself of the sarcastic expression continually playing round his mouth and flashing from his eyes, which gave him the air of a cold and impassible calculator; while nevertheless he was frequently ruled by his powerful imagination; sometimes led away by it to an extent befitting the most fantastic of visionaries.’14

     

Such was the man who rode alongside Cesare Borgia towards the betrayal which Cesare considered his “beautiful deception”. By this time, lacking support of the powerful Venetians which they had been counting upon, the revolt of the condottieri had run out of steam, and it was in attempting to re-pledge themselves to Cesare that they met their doom. He first led them to believe they were welcome back to the fold, but after they had served him in the capture of the Adriatic city of Sinigaglia, in December 1502, he sprang a trap as they rode in triumph through the city, and their four leaders were captured. Two were immediately strangled. The remaining pair, the brothers Francesco and Paulo Orsini, were very well connected men, relatives of the powerful Cardinal Orsini. But Alexander freed Cesare of any concern by inviting the Cardinal to dinner in the Vatican, and poisoning him. The way cleared, Cesare had the Orsini brothers strangled.

     

Cesare’s guile and ruthlessness could not fail to impress Machiavelli, who later wrote in The Prince that only “inhuman cruelty” on the part of the commander could maintain unity and discipline in an army. As such, Cesare made an ideal executive, and his actions, to Machiavelli’s mind, exemplary. But he did not maintain his high regard for Cesare, after the reign of the Borgias unravelled spectacularly. Rarely has a ruling house of such fearsome repute been laid low so quickly.

     

Cesare had long suffered venereal affliction, the so-called “French Disease”. Returning home in Rome in 1503, he got around the streets alone at night clad in black and masked to hide the syphilitic disfigurement of his once handsome features. On 12 August 1503, both Alexander and Cesare fell ill after a dinner in the Vatican, and Alexander died six days later. Talk abounded in Rome that they had both been accidentally stricken with poison intended for another dinner guest, but the most common view now is that they succumbed to a virulent fever rife that year. Alexander had been susceptible because of his advancing years, and Cesare due to his advanced syphilis.

     

Though very seriously ill, Cesare sent his men in to ransack the Vatican treasury while he still had the chance, but it was the last stand of a desperate man. With Alexander dead, the French quickly cooled to Cesare, and while he was recovering the dispossessed rulers and cities of central Italy rallied against him. Cesare’s troops - and with them his power - melted away into the countryside of the Romagna.

     

Confused perhaps by the sudden death of Alexander, the cardinals elected the elderly Pope Pius III, who himself died three weeks later. When the cardinals were again asked to decide on a pope, the old enemy of the Borgias, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, was the frontrunner. Enticed towards a deal to salvage some of his power, Cesare backed della Rovere, a surprise  decision which Machiavelli later noted foundered on the foolish notion that unlike him, della Rovere would keep his word.

     

He didn’t. Soon after his accession, Pope Julius II (his adopted name is suspected of being be a joke pun at the expense of Cesare - “Caesar”) had the former tyrant, now little more than a desperado on the run, arrested. Cesare was packed off home to Spain where life got little better for him, and he died cut down in a skirmish in 1507. He was 32. By this time Machiavelli had turned from admiration to loathing, declaring ‘He merited the most miserable of deaths.’

11. Burckhardt, J., op cit p110

12. Chamberlin, E.R., op cit, p 49

13. Burckhardt, J., op cit p110

14. Bull, G, introduction to Machiavelli’s The Prince, p17

15. The Borgias: The Art of Power 

     

 For Lucrezia, see: 

http://larrybuttrose.blogspot.com.au/2010/11/how-bad-were-borgias-really.html

 from my book, Tales of the Popes: From Eden to El Dorado.

http://www.newholland.com.au/product.php?isbn=9781741106664

BORGIA, THE PAPAL BULL

     One can make this generalisation about men: they are               

ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers, they shun danger         

and are greedy for profit.

                                     

                                             - Machiavelli, The Prince

Such was the impact of the Borgias upon the world of the Renaissance that their name still retains its power to evoke thoughts of treachery, debauchery and murder. The head of the Borgia clan was something else too: a pope. The Roman Catholic Church has long sighed with resignation about its numerous “bad popes”, but to many eyes Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, was the baddest of the bad, bad to the bone. Whether this is the truth is still a matter of debate among mediaeval historians, where reputations have been forged by the latest revision upwards of his reputation, or a freshly penned scathing rebuttal.

     

It is perhaps fitting that the coat of arms of the Borgia family is a bull: Rodrigo Borgia was the bull in the china shop of the Vatican. He lived with faint regard to the moral code of his Church or his times, wielded papal authority like a grasping duke, and instilled fear into friend and foe alike, a practice refined into an art form by his even more notorious son, Cesare, upon whose statecraft of cynicism, or realpolitik, Niccolo Machiavelli in part, at the least, wrought The Prince. Accounts of Cesare’s sister Lucrezia as a seductress and poisoner, a definitive femme fatale, have also spiced the pages of history and popular fiction.  

     

The first hurdle Rodrigo Borgia had to cross on his way to the Church’s highest office, was that he was a Spaniard. He was born in Valencia in 1531, but the ambitious young cleric was fortunate to arrive in Rome under the patronage of a fellow Borgia, his uncle Pope Calixtus III, who later made him a cardinal. Calixtus also brought Rodrigo’s elder brother Pedro to Rome, and invested him with titles, but Pedro’s avarice for the gold of the leading families of Rome eventually brought about his downfall, and he died in exile.

     

At the age of 30, after Rodrigo had already fathered three children with various mistresses, he took a Roman aristocrat, Vanozzi dei Cataneis, as his lover. It would prove no mere fling: they remained together for more than a quarter of a century, and she bore him four children, including Cesare and Lucrezia.1

     

It is said of the sometimes jovial but often querulous and endlessly scheming Rodrigo, that at least he loved his family, as he certainly did. Eventually, however, he took the younger and more glamorous Guilia Farnese as his mistress, when he was in his fifties and approaching the apogee of his power.

    

Rodrigo made little attempt to mask his worldly appetites, and on the contrary so flaunted them as a rising young cardinal that Pope Pius II was caused to chastise him severely.

     

‘Beloved Son, We have heard that, four days ago, several ladies of Siena - women entirely given over to worldly frivolities - were assembled in the gardens of the Giovanni di Bichis...  We have heard that the most licentious dances were indulged in, none of the allurements of love were lacking and you conducted yourself in a wholly worldly manner. Shame forbids mention of all that took place - not only the acts themselves but their very names are unworthy of your position... All Siena is talking about this orgy...’2

     

Despite such admonishments, Rodrigo Borgia maintained a steady march upward through the Church hierarchy, and when Pope Innocent VIII died in 1492, he considered the papal tiara itself within his grasp. By then he was one of the most experienced operators in the Vatican, and only too aware the votes of the conclave of cardinals were open to the highest bidder. He had amassed a fortune from his offices in the Church, and was determined to outbid his Italian rivals for the prize.  

     

‘His revenues from his papal offices, his abbeys in Italy and Spain, and his three bishoprics are vast. His office of Vice Chancellor alone yields him 8000 gold ducats annually. His plate, his pearls, his stuffs embroidered with silk and gold, his books are all of such high quality as would befit a king or pope. Altogether it is believed that he possesses more gold and riches of every sort than all the other cardinals put together.’3  

     

The conclave reached an easy decision in his favour, the smoke poured from the chimneys of the Vatican announcing his election, and unlikely as it might have appeared to powerbrokers in the years beforehand, the sexagenarian Spaniard had won the papal prize. As such he was the best pope money could buy, even if later events revealed the quality of the goods unsatisfactory in the end.

     

This is not to say that he did not possess personal virtues, or was unable at least to conjure the outline of them. As his official secretary remarked: ‘He knew how to dominate, how to shine in conversation, how to appear dignified. Majestic in stature, he had the advantage over lesser men. He was just at that age, sixty, at which Aristotle says men are wisest. He was robust in body and vigourous in mind and so was perfectly suited to his new position.’4

     

Not all who dealt with him were so easily charmed. The  Florentine scholar Francesco Guicciardini wrote: ‘His manner was dissolute. He knew neither shame nor sincerity, neither faith nor religion. Moreover he was possessed by an insatiable greed, and overwhelming ambition and a burning passion for the advancement of his many children who, in order to carry out his iniquitous decrees, did not scruple to employ the most heinous means.’5

     

Rodrigo Borgia had however inherited a papacy already diminished by many years of profligate and scandalous behaviour: ‘the corruption, which seemed to culminate in this family, was already far advanced when they came to Rome.’6 

     

As such it was not their notorious personal behaviour which would bring abiding opprobrium to the house of Borgia, but their methods of achieving their ends, a melding of terror and treachery later proclaimed the ideal for rulers by Machiavelli. ‘Their (the Borgias) immediate purpose, which in fact, they attained, was the complete subjugation of the Pontifical State.’7

     

To bolster his authority, on assuming the papacy Alexander made his son Cesare a cardinal, even if the young man had limited training and even less interest in clerical matters. He also schemed to break marriage vows exchanged on behalf of his teenage daughter Lucrezia with a Spanish dynasty of no further use to him, betrothing her to Giovanni Sforza, an Italian prince of promise and influence, lord of Pesaro and kin to the rulers of Milan.

     

Giovanni and Lucrezia were married with great pomp in the Vatican in 1493, the year after Alexander’s accession. The marriage was not fated to last long however. When shifting allegiances rendered the Sforzas of little more use, the young Giovanni was compelled to sign a statement that he was impotent and the marriage to Lucrezia unconsummated, and Alexander annulled the union. After the marriage was dissolved and while she was staying in a convent, Lucrezia became pregnant to an emissary sent by her father, but this detail did not prevent him issuing a bull declaring her a virgin. Such brazen behaviour had tongues wagging in Rome, and up and down the boot of Italy.

     

‘Throughout his papacy... Alexander VI was surrounded by a buzz of scandal. Gossiping about popes has always been a favourite Italian pastime, but probably no other pope has ever afforded so much occasion for juicy gossip. Other popes had kept mistresses in the Vatican, and simony and immorality were no more rife in Rome under the Borgia Pope than they had been under his predecessors and would be under his successors. But there was a sort of childlike shamelessness about Alexander VI which invited comment. Other popes had auctioned off high ecclesiastical offices, doublecrossed their associates and allies, and used their exalted position for the advancement of their families and base personal ends, but usually they pretended to be doing something else. Rodrigo Borgia had either an honest scorn for hypocrisy or a naive ignorance of the force of public opinion. Other popes had thrown wild parties at the Vatican, but no other pope had made the parties so flamboyant or public. And no other pope had had a portrait of his official mistress, robed as the Virgin Mary, painted over the door of his bedchamber.’8

     

In this respect at least, he did break new ground for sexual shenanigans in the Vatican. But ironically enough, although he was a career womaniser, and his official mistress had numerous rivals, Alexander was in some other respects quite abstemious, and despite his corporeal bulk more sparing than some with food and drink. He is also considered to have acquitted himself as an able if not conscientious administrator, determined to make the Roman streets safer, and to trim the Vatican’s notorious reels of red tape, as well as being something of a patron of the arts.

     

But it was his carnal activities which inevitably aroused the keenest interest, and soon after he took the papal throne the rumours spread of wild parties and orgies in the Vatican, even private bullfights in the courtyards. Some accused him of treating the Vatican as a high class brothel. The rude Spaniards aroused the ire of the old ruling families of Rome, who despite any activities of their own demanded at least a degree of decorum.        There was even talk of incest between the Borgias, chatter in part instigated and fanned along by powerful rivals and jilted allies. All this led to agitation at home and abroad by Alexander’s most bitter enemy, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, but it was an allegation of collusion by Alexander with the Muslim Sultan Bazajet that prompted the young French king, Charles VIII, to the view that the Borgia pope was a traitor to Christendom. A French invasion of the Italian peninsula followed.

     

The powerful French army met little resistance as it swept south. Charles and his men were welcomed into Florence by the  preacher Girolamo Savonarola, who saw in Charles “the sword of God” he had prophesied, and with French help he overthrew the ruling Medici and installed himself as Florentine ruler. Charles continued south, and entered Rome unopposed. As the new year 1495 dawned, his troops controlled the city, and his advisors urged him to depose Alexander at once. But the young king was unsure of how to proceed.

     

‘Once more the vast, undefinable, intangible power of the supreme pontiff and universal pope came to the aid of the Italian prince... could the rest of Christendom be persuaded that they were acting from love of the Holy Church and not from plain politics? How would Charles’s deeply religious subjects take it? And in any case, who would fill the vacant throne? In the last analysis, the decision was Charles’s - a decision which the weak young man did not dare to make.’9

    

Instead of overthrowing the Pope, he exacted favours, and taking Alexander’s son Cesare as a hostage, continued south to threaten the kingdom of Naples, to which he asserted a family claim. Cesare escaped and returned to Rome, and although the French took Naples with little effort and indulged themselves in extended looting of its treasures, the entire campaign turned to sand in Charles’s fingers. While Charles entertained himself in Naples, Alexander organised the powerful Venetians and Milanese against the French, with support from Spain, into the coalition of the Holy League.

     

By the time Charles returned north he found himself pitted against very powerful forces, fighting every step of the way. The French saw their Neapolitan booty eaten away bit by bit, spent on sorely needed provisions and arms, and gone to vapour on the battlefield. In Florence, Charles’s erstwhile friend Savonarola castigated him, saying he was incurring the wrath of God because he had failed in his holy duty to reform Rome. The climax came in July 1495, when troops of the Holy League vanquished the French in the Battle of Fornuovo near Parma in northern Italy. Charles lost nearly all his remaining loot, and the French straggled home across the Alps a harried, battered force.

     

Having dealt with Charles, Alexander now turned his attention to the problem of Florence itself, and the outspoken friar whose name he added to his death list. Savonarola was born into the aristocracy, and entered the Dominican order, rising to become Vicar-General in 1493. As word filtered back from Rome about the excesses of newly-installed Alexander, Savonarola started preaching fire and brimstone sermons against Christendom’s moral decline, of sexual licentiousness, corruption and the luxuries of earthly wealth. 

     

He also spoke out against Florence’s ruler, the now ailing Lorenzo de Medici, although his words may also have been double-pointed, simultaneously aimed at Rome. ‘Tyrants are incorrigible because they are proud, because they love flattery, because they will not restore their ill-gotten gains. They allow bad officials to have their way; they yield to adulation; they neither heed the poor nor condemn the rich...’ 10

      

After the arrival of the French army and his usurpation of Medici power, Savonarola became in effect head of his own theocratic state, the so-called Catholic Commonwealth, backed by followers called the Piagnoni, the “Weepers” or “Snivellers”, so named for the emotional reaction he elicited from them through his sermons. Savonarola sought to purge the wealthy city of Florence of its treasure trove of earthly finery, which went up in flames in his infamous Bonfire of the Vanities.

     

Although there was more than one such Bonfire - and there had been previous instances of similar events in other parts of Italy - the most famous occurred at the onset of Lent in February 1497, when Savonarola sent his minions around the city collecting books and works of art, women’s dresses and jewellery, cosmetics and mirrors, gambling tables, even chess sets, which were put to the torch on bonfires in the Piazza della Signoria.10A 

     

The Bonfires of the Vanities are believed to have devoured some fine Renaissance works, including some by the young Michelangelo. There were even accounts of young artists, among them Sandro Botticelli, a follower of Savonarola, becoming swept up in the fervour and tossing their own works onto the pyres.

     

Although Savonarola loathed Alexander and largely ignored his edicts from Rome, the friar’s claims to the gift of prophecy led to an investigation of heresy in Florence, and he was forbidden to preach. His end came when the apocalypse he had predicted failed to eventuate, and a populace which had been urged to destroy its most precious possessions rioted a few months later, in May 1497, and drinking, gambling and bawdy behaviour spread through the city. With calls to restore the Medici, Savonarola’s reign was effectively over.        

     

Alexander had the last word against his enemy when he signed his death warrant in 1498. Savonarola and two of his disciples were strangled and burned in the Piazza della Signoria, where his infamous Bonfire had burned only a year before. 

from my book, Tales of the Popes: From Eden to El Dorado.

http://www.newholland.com.au/product.php?isbn=9781741106664

1. He went on to father nine children in all, by various women, two of them conceived in the Vatican while he was pope.

2. The letter ws written in 1460, when Rodrigo Borgia was 29. quoted in Chamberlin, R., The Bad Popes, p161.

3. Chamberlin, E.R., Cesare Borgia, p2

4. Chamberlin, R., The Bad Popes, p172

5. ibid, p173

6. Burckhardt, J., The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, p109

7. ibid, p 109

8. Mattingly, G., Machiavelli in Plumb, J.H. (ed), Renaissance Profiles, p23

9. Chamberlin, R., op cit, pp184-5

10. Roeder, R., in Plumb, J.H. (ed), Renaissance Profiles, p68

DON'T WORRY BE HAPPY