The House of Borgia, book 2

CHAPTER 15

The winter sun had watered away, black skies had held bruised dominion over the northern plains and spring had come again with a great flowering of oleanders. By the time young men's fancies had led them into woods and dales to suck the nectar of their loved and lust-ed-after ones, Cesare was sufficiently lord of the northern provinces to be able to declare himself Duke of Romagna and return again to Rome in even greater pomp and glory than before.

But greater campaigns were afoot and it soon filtered to the Vatican, to be followed by official notification from the ambassadors, that by the Treaty of Granada, both France and Spain had come to agreement about the division of a long disputed territory? the Kingdom of Naples, to which both claimed the right of sovereignty through heritage.

The two claimants, it was revealed, had agreed to undertake the conquest together, sharing the spoils between them. Puglia and Calabria would go to Spain, and Naples and the Abruzzi to Louis.

Pope Alexander immediately declared Federigo of Naples deposed for disobedience to the Church, a charge which was not difficult to fabricate under a number of pretexts.

Cesare, it was decided, should join the French troops, marching through Italy from the north, taking with him a fair proportion of his own troops.

At the same time Gonzalo de Cordoba, the great Spanish soldier, landed a Spanish army in Calabria. Resistance was put up, strong in places, weak in others, but the territory was ravaged and stamped underfoot by the two mighty armies moving inexorably to meet. Within a few weeks they had met at Naples and the days of the House of Aragon were over. Nevertheless, Naples itself put up a stiff resistance and with well-directed cannon fire played such havoc with the lines of the Spaniards who, in enthusiasm to finish the campaign in record time, had permitted themselves to approach too close too soon, that Gonzalo de Cordoba swore a terrible vengeance when the city was taken.

The inevitable breach was made and the waves of the invading armies stormed through. Carnage followed. No quarter was given. The defenders were driven back and back and if they lay down their arms or fled they were slaughtered. This would have been against Cesare's policy. But for once he commanded only a small section of the attack and commands could be issued over his head by the generals of the two main forces, French and Spanish.

Every human being was butchered. The streets of Naples ran with blood as if an animal sacrifice of unheard-of magnitude had been offered for several days running.

But it was with the women of Naples that the invader took the most sadistic vengeance. Women, fleeing, screaming, were seized and raped and massacred. While soldiers ran, searching for victims through the streets, they would pass prostrate huddles of women, their clothes ripped from them by the sword, screaming and weeping, while shaggy soldiers thrust their pricks brutally up into bodies whose thighs they held wide by force.

Gonzalo de Cordoba had some of the most noble families of the city rounded up and saved from the slaughter. He had them taken to the center square of the city where the men were tied so that they couldn't move. He then had the women stripped, surrounded by soldiers wielding whips and forced to dance in front of their menfolk and his army of gawking soldiers, to the accompaniment of light lashes around their legs, which grew stronger and stronger and rose around their hips and breasts until many of them fainted and blood had welled out from under their tortured skins.

Cesare, with the situation out of his hands, was indifferent to the suffering. He watched and felt a chill of sensuality course through him as he watched the women pathetically trying to dance, being savagely tickled as soon as they lagged by those stinging lashes. What a variety of breasts and buttocks. And as they fell one by one into a swooning helplessness under the agonized gaze of their helpless husbands and sweethearts, each was seized at the Commander's orders by a rude soldier who proceeded to bury his prick according to his taste, right there on the square in full view. Some of the women remained unconscious throughout the whole proceedings, unaware of the brutality with which they were being shagged or their menfolk's crying fury.