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