Cesare Borgia Read online

  SARAH BRADFORD

  CESARE BORGIA

  HIS LIFE AND TIMES

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: The Borgia Legend

  I The Stage

  II The Cardinal’s Bastard

  III The Pope’s Lieutenant

  IV The Envy of Brothers

  V Crossing the Rubicon

  VI Two Women

  VII Valentino and the Virago

  VIII Roman Summer

  IX Lord of Romagna

  X The Terrible Duke

  XI ‘The Prince’

  XII ‘A Most Beautiful Deception’

  XIII Son of Fortune

  XIV Lone Wolf

  XV Confrontation

  XVI ‘Either Caesar or Nothing’

  Epilogue

  Select Bibliography

  Maps

  Italy in 1494

  Cesare Borgia’s Romagna Campaigns

  CESARE BORGIA

  Sarah Bradford is a historian and biographer. Her books include Cesare Borgia (1976); Disraeli (1982), winner of the New York Times Book of the Year; Princess Grace (1984); Sacherevell Sitwell (1993); Elizabeth: A Biography of Her Majesty the Queen (1996); America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (2000); Lucrezia Borgia (2005) and Diana (2007). She frequently appears on television as an authority on her biographical subjects and as a commentator on notable royal events. She is currently working on a biography of Queen Elizabeth II, to be published in Viking in 2012, and a full-scale biography of Queen Victoria. She lives in London.

  Introduction

  The Borgia Legend

  CESARE BORGIA’s name has been a byword for evil for over five centuries.

  He was born, the illegitimate son of the Spanish Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, later Pope Alexander VI, into a world which has been called ‘the Golden Age of Bastards’. The princely courts of fifteenth-century Italy swarmed with the rulers’ children struggling for a career through war, the Church, marriage or, not infrequently, assassination. ‘The wicked custom of poisoning men’, wrote the great Florentine historian Guicciardini, ‘is a common practice in many parts of Italy.’ Life was short; time pressed on ambitious men.

  Wielding the sword and backed by the power, wealth and prestige of the Papacy itself, Cesare at twenty-seven became the most feared, hated and envied man in Italy, earning himself the reputation of the terrible Valentino’. Each of the princes and states in turn felt themselves menaced by his growing ambition, and his threat to the Italian political establishment generated a sense of shock and outrage which formed the basis of the Borgia legend.

  This legend arises from the pages of contemporary accounts of the Borgias, the stuff of a sinister reputation that has shadowed them, and Cesare in particular, down the ages. Cesare was accused of murder, rape, incest, robbery and treachery – much the same charges which were levelled at his father the Pope. There were elements of truth in these accusations, but contemporary reactions to the Borgias were not based solely on moral grounds. It was an age in which the standards of public and private morality were far from strict: double-dealing and intrigue were regarded as an integral part of the game of politics and war, political assassination was common, and Alexander VI was not the first pope to have had a hand in it.

  Most of the Italian lordships were founded upon violent conquest, and violence remained very much a part of political life. In the cities of Italy the factions fought each other bloodily in the streets, the Baglionis against the Oddis at Perugia, the Orsinis against the Colonnas in Rome. The pursuit of the vendetta, either as an act of personal vengeance or by the use of hired assassins, was an accepted custom; Cellini in his autobiography boasted of the many fatal brawls in which he had been involved.

  Violence and murder were equally common in the private lives of the Italian signorial families. Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini had two of his wives murdered: one poisoned, the other suffocated. Francesca Manfredi of Faenza lured her husband into her bedchamber on the pretext of being unwell and had him stabbed there by concealed assassins; when they bungled the job she coolly stepped forward, a fifteenth-century Lady Macbeth, and finished him off with a dagger thrust in the stomach. In July of 1500, in a bloodbath known as ‘the Red Wedding’, half the feuding Baglioni family of Perugia murdered the other half in their beds, a massacre which was quite overshadowed in contemporary chronicles by a single act of violence committed by Cesare at the time.

  Sexual licence applied to laymen and clerics alike. The great lords had numerous mistresses who might be of noble or common birth, courtesans or married women, and broods of bastards who were brought up at their courts side by side with their legitimate children. The great churchmen behaved in the same way: Pope Sixtus IV’s nephew, the flamboyant Cardinal Pietro Riario, kept a mistress whose shoes were sewn with pearls; of the Renaissance popes both Innocent VIII and Julius II as well as Alexander VI had illegitimate children A thriving population of whores serviced the swarming clerics in Rome, and the conventual orgies described in Aretino’s I Ragionamenti were not figments of the author’s imagination. Incest and sodomy were accepted, though officially frowned upon: Gian Paolo Baglioni of Perugia received ambassadors while lying in bed with his sister; Sigismondo Malatesta, whom Pope Pius II called ‘the worst scoundrel of all the men who have ever lived or ever will live, the disgrace of Italy and the infamy of our times’, was alleged not only to have committed incest with his daughter but to have attempted sodomy with his son. Yet it was for heresy, not sexual misdemeanours, that the same Pope later excommunicated him.

  Why then has Cesare Borgia come down to us as the archetype of criminality? The hostility of his Italian contemporaries towards him and his family can be partially explained on the grounds of their Spanish blood. Italians disliked and despised all foreigners, whom they regarded as ‘barbarians’, and Spaniards most of all – with good reason. In Italy, where the Aragonese dynasty ruled Naples and Sicily, Spanish soldiers of fortune had already displayed that combination of courage, pride, endurance, ferocity and greed which was to drive the conquistadors on their bloody progress through the New World. From the pages of Aretino it is clear that the Spaniards in Rome were looked on as a kind of Mafia, and it is probable that the great families of Italy saw the Borgias in that light. Marrano, ‘secret Jew’, was the epithet most commonly thrown at Spaniards in Italy, and one which Cesare’s enemies frequently used to describe him.

  Racial prejudice, however, is an insufficient explanation for the devil-figure which Cesare represented to his contemporaries; it is their constant references to his ‘dangerous nature’ which give us the clue. Cesare Borgia was a dangerous man, with one quality above all which made him so: a driving ambition which was the key to his whole life, the underlying theme of his complex character. He was one of those rare men born with a superlative ambition to which all else was subordinated, a quality which makes a man a maverick among his fellows, and a threat to the normal tenor of their lives. Moreover Cesare deliberately created his own myth by calculated acts of terror, veiling his life in a secrecy which gave his sudden brutalities and lightning moves added impact.

  Cesare’s character was bewildering in its contradictions: he was a brilliant student, a man of lucid intelligence, possessed of notorious charm and eloquence– ‘of his mind and tongue he makes what use he wills’, one despairing envoy wrote of him. He was strong, athletic, an expert horseman and a skilful military leader. Even his enemies never denied his personal courage: ‘In war he was a good companion and a brave man,’ a French fellow officer recorded of him. He was also totally amoral, vengeful, treacherous and deceitful, ‘the great dissembler’ as Machiavelli described him, a man apparently incapable of deep and
lasting human affection – except perhaps for his sister, Lucrezia. His complexities baffled even that acute observer Machiavelli, who saw the careful picture he had built up of Cesare shattered in an hour, so that he doubted whether it had been the truth or simply a mirage.

  And so, to find the reality behind the myth, one must look beyond the kaleidoscope of contemporary impressions, sort out the distortions, and evaluate the man himself according to the facts – as far as they can be known after five centuries have passed. Cesare Borgia was above all a political animal, and it is in the context of contemporary politics that his story must be told.

  I

  The Stage

  CESARE was destined to play his part in the limelight of the international stage. Fifteenth-century Italy was the centre of the civilized world, her cities far surpassing those of northern Europe in artistic achievement, learning, living standards, economic and political sophistication. But the glamour of Italy was only part of her attraction; early in the century the popes had returned to Rome from Avignon, and in a Europe still acknowledging the Roman creed the Eternal City was thus once again the focus of Christendom. Religion and politics were closely intertwined; the pope as spiritual ruler of the Christian world exercised enormous influence in international affairs and the action of the Papacy was central to the political calculations of the secular powers.

  Yet Italy as a political entity did not exist; the Italian peninsula was a patchwork of independent states jostling for power and survival, a game in which the five major players, Venice, Milan, Florence, Naples and the Papacy, used the smaller princedoms as pawns on the political chessboard.

  The ruling families of these minor states held absolute sway over their subjects, maintaining an outward appearance of independence which belied their real status as clients, victims and vassals of their greater neighbours. The Estes of Ferrara, the Gonzagas of Mantua and the Montefeltros of Urbino led cultivated lives in exquisite surroundings. They patronized the arts not only from private taste but for public prestige, often supplementing the revenues stretched by this extravagance by fighting as mercenary captains, condottieri, in the incessant quarrels of the other Italian powers. Yet despite their many palaces, their paintings, silks and jewels, their stables of stud horses and strings of hunting dogs, there was unease behind the glitter. The movements of the major powers beyond their frontiers could threaten their very existence; they were small floes in a shifting pack, at the mercy of political forces over which they had no control.

  The greater Italian states, Venice, Milan, Florence, Naples and the Papacy, coexisted in an uneasy balance of power maintained by mutual jealousy rather than common interest. In Guicciardini’s words, they were ‘full of emulation among themselves, they did not cease to observe assiduously what the others were doing, each of them reciprocally aborting all the plans whereby any of the others might become more powerful or renowned’.

  Venice and Milan, outstripping the other states in financial and military resources, regarded each other with a deep hostility. Venice, the great city on the Adriatic, ruled by an intelligent and ruthless oligarchy, enjoyed a political stability which led other Italians to call her enviously ‘the Immortal’. She maintained an overseas empire and a web of international commerce stretching over the known world, with the resources of a vast naval armoury, an efficient and ubiquitous spy service carried on by her diplomats and agents, and the industries – silks, jewellery, sweetmeats, Murano glass – which supplied the luxury needs of Europe. Traditionally Venice had observed a serene neutrality towards Italian affairs, but since the fall of Constantinople in 1453 her overseas empire had been gradually dwindling under the attacks of the Turks, and there were now signs that she was turning a predatory eye towards the Italian mainland to compensate for her losses overseas.

  Milan, whose territories marched with those of Venice, naturally looked on her expansionist tendencies with distrust. The duchy of Milan straddled the rich countryside of Lombardy; the city itself with 300,000 inhabitants was larger than either Paris or Rome, and the revenues of the Milanese state, drawn from its industries of silk, armoury and agriculture, were only slightly less than those of France and England. All power was in the hands of Ludovico Maria Sforza, known as il Moro from his emblem, the mulberry, who ruled in the name of his nephew Gian Galeazzo. Ludovico was intelligent and cultivated, the patron of Leonardo da Vinci and Bramante, and a man of considerable personal charm. But he was also vain, an inveterate intriguer with a fatal tendency to overestimate his own cleverness and underestimate his enemies – and insatiably ambitious. ‘A man born for the ruin of Italy,’ commented the historian Paolo Giovio, and indeed Ludovico’s ambition to become the acknowledged Duke of Milan was to have disastrous consequences for himself and his country.

  Florence, the citizen republic on the Arno, could not be compared with Milan either in lands or in wealth, deriving her strength from Tuscan industry, the cloth trade and her role in the international banking system, and her prestige from the Medici family, whose leader, the brilliant Lorenzo, controlled the affairs of the city with a wise and subtle hand. But despite the genius of her artists and the industry of her merchants and artisans, Florence was militarily weak, and the stability of her civic system less assured than it outwardly appeared.

  Far to the south of Florence, the kingdom of Naples represented the explosive potential of an already unstable situation. For over two centuries the succession to the Kingdom had been disputed between the Spanish kings of Aragon and the French dukes of Anjou, a quarrel which had been temporarily resolved in favour of a junior branch of the Aragonese royal house. But the King of Naples, the cunning and cruel Ferrante, did not rule a united people; his barons were divided between the partisans of the Angevin claims and those who supported the Aragonese, so that the succession question remained a smouldering issue for the future. Indeed, ‘the Kingdom’, as it was known, had always been the magnet for foreign invaders, and it was against the backdrop of an international scramble for Naples that Cesare Borgia was to make his career. Moreover, the question of Naples involved the Papacy, since the pope was feudal suzerain of the Kingdom and had the right to the investiture of the candidate to the crown: as such he would be the official arbiter in any quarrel over the succession.

  The Papacy itself was, geographically, politically and spiritually, the centre of the Italian firmament. In Rome the Renaissance popes lived in a style indistinguishable from the courts of contemporary monarchs. Even as early as the twelfth century, St Bernard of Clairvaux had rebuked Pope Eugenius III for adopting the outward signs of the imperial rather than the apostolic succession: ‘The pope is decked in gold, mounted on a white horse, surrounded by troops and officers … In this you have succeeded not to Peter but to Constantine …’ The Renaissance popes employed this imperial splendour as a deliberate policy aimed at reasserting the prestige of the Papacy after the humiliating years of exile at Avignon, when General Councils of the Church had attempted to limit papal power. The first of the great building popes of the Renaissance, Nicholas V, told the cardinals on his deathbed that he knew the faith of the masses to be fragile because the people lacked instruction, therefore it was important to consolidate their faith by the spectacle of material grandeur. Nicholas V (1447–55), Sixtus IV (1471–84) and later Julius II (1503–13) conceived their ambitious reconstruction of Rome as the resurrection of the imperial city, the outward symbol of the pope’s empire as the successor both to Peter and to Constantine.

  The popes were absolute masters of the city of Rome, from which they derived a considerable part of their revenues. Although the city retained a façade of limited autonomy, with its own senator and civil service, and shared in the administration of justice with the papal court, financial affairs were entirely in the hands of the pope’s officials. The pope stood at the apex of a court comprising palace officials, secret chamberlains, grooms, clerks, secretaries and guards, a household which in the time of Sixtus IV cost some 30,000–40,000 florins
a year to maintain, and a vast and expanding bureaucracy, the Curia. The Curia comprised three main financial departments: the Chancery, headed by the vice-chancellor, the most important figure in the hierarchy after the pope himself, wielding such profitable instruments as papal bulls, briefs and admonitions, with which the pope regulated the affairs of Christendom; the Camera, which administered the spiritual and temporal income under the direction of a cardinal chamberlain; and the Datariat, which was concerned with the revenues from the sale of offices, fees for dispensations and annulments. Other departments included that of the apostolic penitentiary, responsible for issuing absolution for sins and remitting penances, and the Rota, a court of justice headed by the cardinal vice-chancellor. The official revenues of the Papacy in the late fifteenth century amounted to some 300,000 ducats per annum, which already made it one of the richest of the Italian powers, but to this must be added incalculable (since unrecorded) sums available to the pope from gifts and other sources dealt with through what was known as his secret treasury, and administered by a private treasurer.

  The only constitutional check on the absolute power of the pope was provided by the College of Cardinals, but the popes, in the manner of secular politicians, reacted to opposition from this quarter by packing it with their partisans, often their own relations. The strength of the pope vis-à-vis his cardinals was the same as that of a king of France or of England in relation to their great barons; he was the source of patronage, of the offices and benefices which enabled the cardinals to maintain their splendid style of living. As princes of the Church they were expected to live like worldly princes; Paolo Cortese in his book De Cardinalatu, the ecclesiastical equivalent of Castiglione’s The Courtier, specified that a cardinal should be rich and noble by birth, magnificent in himself and liberal with his money, and inhabit a superbly decorated palace. Such palaces, some of which were more lavishly equipped than the Vatican itself, required huge households, on average some 150 persons; the financial strain of keeping up appearances on such a scale was considerable. Burckhardt, the great historian of the Renaissance, wrote of ‘the secret misery of prelates who, notwithstanding heavy debts, were forced to live in a style befitting their rank’. At the court of Rome, as elsewhere, prestige depended on expenditure and credit could be raised on status and expectations, with the result that even the highest ranking cardinals were often deeply in debt. It was therefore vitally important that a cardinal should belong to the inner circle of ‘Curia cardinals’ close to the pope; the vice-chancellor, head of the Papal Chancery, received 6000 ducats a year from his office, as did the apostolic penitentiary, the chamberlain probably even more. Cardinals known to be influential with the pope could become ‘cardinal protectors’ of secular states, and in return for acting in the interests of their secular clients received rich benefices, pensions, and subsidies. Thus the pope stood at the apex of the power pyramid, while the cardinals and officials scrabbled for position on its slopes.