The Borgias

— CHAPTER 21 — The New Bride

‘LOOK AT THE GREAT LADY!’

THE BRIDAL CAVALCADE travelled slowly up the Via Flaminia in the gently falling snow. A few miles north of Rome, Lucrezia bid farewell to Cardinal Ippolito d’Este and her beloved brother Cesare, who returned to the city and the warmth of their own fireplaces, leaving Lucrezia to continue her long journey through the Apennines north to Ferrara with her own retinue, which numbered some seven hundred people, escorted by the five hundred men of the Ferrarese party that had travelled to Rome the previous December.

‘There was no bishop, nor protonotary, nor abbot,’ recorded a shocked Burchard, but Lucrezia was accompanied by her cousin Cardinal Francisco Borgia, whom Alexander VI had appointed legate to the Papal States. And to augment the party of Roman nobles travelling with her, Cesare had provided her not only with two hundred gentlemen from his own household, but had also ordered a number of musicians and clowns to entertain her on her way. As well as some 10,000 ducats for her expenses on the journey, the pope had provided her with a sedan chair, which she was to share with the Duchess of Urbino, from Gubbio to Ferrara. Lucrezia’s retinue was also impressive, including numerous squires and cooks, stable boys and dressmakers, and, of course, her own ladies-in-waiting, among whom, according to the reports Isabella d’Este received from her informant, were several beauties, one with syphilis, and ‘one Moor, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.’

Providing mounts for all these attendants had proved a problem for the pope, who was temporarily short of funds after the spectacular expenses he had incurred in entertaining the Este party in Rome, and he had obliged all cardinals in the city to loan either two horses or two mules for Lucrezia’s journey — ‘none of these animals was returned,’ commented Burchard.

The long string of baggage animals winding its way through the snowbound passes of the Apennines was heavily laden. Strapped to the backs of several mules were the heavy padlocked chests containing Lucrezia’s dowry. Over one hundred mules were needed to carry her jewels, linen, and clothes; she took with her no fewer than two hundred expensive shifts and almost as many hats, one of which, according to Isabella d’Este’s informant, was valued at 10,000 ducats.

Despite being shielded from the worst of the weather behind the curtains of her litter, Lucrezia found the journey exhausting. At Spoleto she insisted on stopping for two nights, much to the exasperation of the Ferrarese party, who were keen to get home. Duke Ercole was also informed that she needed to wash her hair with tiresome frequency, and he was forewarned that it would be advisable for him to postpone the date of the bride’s official reception at Ferrara.

The pope also received regular reports on the progress of his daughter’s journey and wrote to her to say that he hoped to hear from her when she reached Ferrara and that he also hoped she was ‘in good health and spirits and, above all, that her face and body were wrapped up against the tempestuous and snowy weather.’ She also heard from Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, who wrote to reassure her about her little two-year-old son, Rodrigo, whom she had been so distressed to leave behind in Rome: ‘Having sent someone this morning to visit the most illustrious lord, Don Rodrigo your son, the messenger reported that His Lordship was sleeping very quietly and contentedly; and thanks be to God he is as handsome and as healthy as anyone could wish.’

On January 16, ten days after bidding farewell to her father, the cavalcade turned off the Via Flaminia onto the steep road leading to the hilltop town of Gubbio, where the redoubtable Duchess of Urbino, Elisabetta Gonzaga, sister-in-law to Isabella d’Este, dressed in her habitual black, waited unsmilingly to meet the horsemen and rumbling carriages. The following day Lucrezia, accompanied by the thirty-year-old duchess, continued the journey in the gilded sedan chair, behind the curtains of which the two women conducted an evidently stilted conversation, their friendship hampered not least by the fact that the duchess believed Cesare guilty of abducting her protégée, Dorotea Malatesta, a year earlier.

At Urbino the duke, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, was awaiting their arrival on the road leading to his capital, the streets of which were decorated with flags and streamers and garlands of dried flowers. Beneath these the brightly painted and heavily laden carts, drawn by bullocks, rattled and screeched into the courtyard of the ducal palace, where Lucrezia was to stay.

For two nights Lucrezia remained in Urbino, staying in the imposing castle and enjoying not only the comforts of aristocratic life but also its lavish balls, banquets, and theatrical entertainments. She appeared at one ball in a dress of black velvet with a huge diamond on her forehead, while the Spanish dwarfs, who formed an ill-disciplined and noisy addition to her suite, hopped and romped around her, crying, ‘Look at the great lady!’

Lucrezia was aware that reports about her appearance and behaviour, even details of her personal hygiene, were being sent to the jealous and formidable Isabella d’Este by her secret informant, a man known as Il Prete (the priest) but whose identity remains mysterious. When his inquisitive behaviour came to Lucrezia’s notice, she sent for the man, questioned him at length, and managed to elicit more information about her new sister-in-law than he had intended to divulge. ‘She is a lady of keen intelligence and perspicacity,’ he afterward reported of Lucrezia; ‘one had to have one’s wits about one when speaking to her.’

The luxuries of the ducal palace, however, were not to be enjoyed for long, and once again the slow and exhausting journey was resumed, now toward Pesaro, still in the stilted company of the Duchess of Urbino, who would stay with her until they reached their destination. The two women arrived at Pesaro on January 21, thankful at least that the stony snowy mountains were, at last, behind them.

At Pesaro — the city that had once belonged to her first husband, Giovanni Sforza, and was now the possession of her brother — it was Cesare’s Spanish governor, Ramiro de Lorqua, who was waiting to welcome her and escort her past the expectant populace crowding the streets. When the cavalcade finally halted that evening, Lucrezia pleaded fatigue as an excuse for not joining a ball that had been arranged in her honour but that would be attended by many of her ex-husband’s subjects; and she retired with her ladies to the quarters assigned to her, where one of her maids performed what was almost a daily ritual by washing her mistress’s long blond hair.

Riding through Cesare’s duchy, the journey along the Via Emilia pleasantly smooth after the rough jolting over the hill roads, Lucrezia reached Cesena, her brother’s capital, on January 24. Here, however, an unsettling rumour of trouble ahead brought an end to such carefree gaiety; it was said that Dorotea Malatesta’s fiancé, the mercenary commander Giambattista Caracciolo, had sworn to take revenge for the kidnapping and was now awaiting to fall upon the Borgia bride somewhere nearby.

The threat, however, did not materialize, and Lucrezia reached Bologna without incident, though her decision to delay her arrival in that city by spending a second night at Imola in order to rest must have irritated Giovanni Bentivoglio and his wife, her hosts in Bologna. After a splendid procession through the city, watched by huge crowds, and another ball, Lucrezia was so tired that she overslept the next morning.

On the last day of January, Lucrezia and the Duchess of Urbino left Bologna for the villa of their hosts at Bentivoglio, near the border of the duchy of Ferrara, and the last stop on her exhaustingly long journey from Rome. Just before sunset an unexpected party of four horsemen were seen dismounting at the door. Lucrezia’s bridegroom, Alfonso d’Este, had impetuously decided to come in person to greet his bride. ‘This act pleased everyone,’ wrote Bernardino Zambotti, the Ferrarese diarist, ‘and especially the bride and her ladies, that his lordship wished to see her,’ and did much to counter the widespread rumours of Alfonso’s opposition to the match.

Alfonso himself was clearly pleased by what he saw; and, so it was reported, he suggested that he and Lucrezia go to bed together there and then. Dissuaded from this impropriety, he returned to Ferrara, where, the next day, standing beside his father, with a company of crossbowmen behind them, he welcomed the ducal barge in which, in staterooms of considerable splendour, Lucrezia had travelled the twenty miles of waterway from Bentivoglio.

At Malalbergo she had been joined by her new sister-in-law, the jealous and hostile Isabella d’Este, who was reluctantly acting, as custom dictated, as hostess for her widowed father, the duke. Her eyes would fill with tears, so Isabella said, when she saw her mother’s ruby necklace hanging around Lucrezia’s graceful neck.

It was not until she disembarked from the ducal barge outside the walls of Ferrara that Lucrezia met her new father-in-law for the first time. The elderly Duke Ercole, almost seventy years old, seemed greatly struck by her appearance and was much entertained by the jokes and posturings of her clowns. He graciously kissed her hand before escorting her to the house of Alberto d’Este, his illegitimate brother, where she would stay the night in order to prepare for her state entry into Ferrara the following day.

The preparations in Ferrara for the arrival of the heir’s bride had been gathering pace over the past weeks: streets were cleaned, horse droppings and mud carted away; inns were fully booked; shops were stocked with splendid stuffs and mementos; tailors and dressmakers worked day and night to finish the new outfits ordered by the city’s courtiers; playwrights and poets were busy writing their dramas, while actors and orators were rehearsing their lines; flags and banners were embroidered with interwoven depictions of the Borgia bull and the Este arms; coats-of-arms of the two families were emblazoned on the gates of the ducal palace. Garlands were hung over shopfronts and tapestries draped from windows above. The army of painters and carpenters had managed to finish a series of elaborate arches erected along the route the procession would take, decorated with mythological scenes to proclaim the union of the two families, the Borgia bull standing solidly beside the black and white eagles of the Este dynasty.

The city seethed with excitement; one Ferrarese diarist spoke for many when he responded to one man who thought the festivities ‘a gross inconvenience, but in my opinion he was speaking like a fool.’

The city’s leading families competed with each other for the honour of providing a daughter to join the bride’s new household and prepared apartments in their palaces to accommodate the official guests who had been invited. Ambassadors arrived from Lucca, Florence, and Siena; the Venetian embassy numbered 150; around the necks of the French embassy, met by the duke in person, one observer counted eighty-four heavy gold chains, worth, he thought, some 35,000 ducats. There were ‘so many visitors in Ferrara,’ he noted, ‘that it was almost impossible to believe.’

Finally, late in the clear, cold afternoon of February 2, the Feast of Candlemas, Lucrezia rode across the bridge over the Po at Castel Tedaldo to enter the city that would be her home for the rest of her life.

Eighty trumpeters led the cavalcade, followed by a hundred mounted crossbowmen, all dressed in the red-and-white Este livery and wearing caps made in the French style, a mark of honour to Louis XII, whose alliance with the pope and Cesare had precipitated the marriage. Next came the heralds wearing black-and-gold tabards and carrying silver trumpets, followed by drummers riding white mules, by armed halberdiers, by mounted pages and nobles and bishops and ambassadors, a gaudy array of gold and silver, red and purple, velvets and silks, and costly fur-lined cloaks — the Spanish courtiers of Cesare’s household provided a sober contrast in their customary plain black.

Spontaneous cheers greeted the bridegroom Alfonso, who was splendidly dressed in grey velvet embroidered with gold — the embroidery alone was said to be worth 8,000 ducats — and a cap trimmed with feathers, riding with his squires astride a superb bay charger caparisoned in purple velvet. Then came the bishops, in white copes and jewelled mitres; the ambassadors in their official finery; and then the drummers and jesters, who heralded the arrival of the bride. This was what the crowds had been waiting for, and they roared their approval.

Riding a snow-white horse with gold trappings, Lucrezia entered Ferrara beneath a white silk canopy decorated with gold fringe, which was carried by eight doctors of the university. She wore a jewelled coif on her head, its value estimated at 15,000 ducats, one of the caps that, as Isabella d’Este acidly remarked, ‘my lord father sent her in Rome,’ adding, ‘Around her throat was the necklace which had belonged to my mother.’ On her feet was a pair of slippers worth 2,000 ducats, and she wore a dress of gold brocade striped with purple satin, ornamented, according to one observer, ‘with so many jewels that it was a marvel,’ with a gold cloak thrown back over one shoulder to display its ermine lining.

Behind her came several open carriages bearing numerous Ferrarese ladies and other guests and, last of all, the long line of pack mules carrying the chests filled with her clothes, jewellery, and other possessions, their loads covered with lengths of deep red satin embroidered with her own device.

Lucrezia’s mount, an elegant bay horse, was startled by the sudden deafening roar of artillery from Castel Tedaldo that sounded as she crossed the bridge, and it reared up, throwing her to the ground. Fortunately she was not hurt but picked herself up, laughing merrily, ‘and this I saw myself because I was right there,’ wrote one observer of the event. A mule was brought for her to continue, and she made her way through the narrow winding streets, past the entertainments staged for her at every turn, and finally into the great piazza in front of the ducal castle.

The piazza was crowded with people, ‘so full,’ remarked one observer, ‘that if a grain of millet had fallen from the sky it would not have reached the ground.’ The arrival of the cavalcade was heralded by a tremendous fanfare from the 113 trumpeters and pipers playing on the balcony of the ducal palace, and the dungeons beneath were opened to release a stream of prisoners. Two men then descended down ropes from the top of the high towers in the piazza, their arms outstretched so that ‘they looked like birds,’ as one man said, to land at Lucrezia’s feet. Zambotti commented that ‘everyone thought it a great marvel because it happened so quickly and neither of them was hurt.’

Lucrezia rode into the courtyard of the palace, where she dismounted and climbed the marble staircase, at the top of which Isabella d’Este and other female members of the ducal family waited to embrace her before escorting her into the Great Hall, which had been hung with cloth-of-gold ‘and silks of great value’ to mark the occasion. There she was guest of honour at the feast, the highlight of which was a series of life-size sculptures all made in sugar, followed by a ball.

At the end of the evening, the bridal couple made their way to their bedchamber in the apartments that had once belonged to Alfonso’s mother. The following day, the bridegroom’s father reported to the pope: ‘Last night our illustrious son, Don Alfonso, went to bed with his wife, and from all accounts, it appears they were quite satisfied with one another.’ Her husband seemed pleased with her and was attentive for the first few days, even though he did not linger for long of a morning in their bed, but, having slept with her, so the Ferrarese ambassador to Rome told the pope, he ‘took his pleasure with other women during the day.’ ‘Being young,’ the pope had commented, complacently, ‘it does him good.’

The phlegmatic, silent bridegroom, a man whose interests, so it was said, were limited to sewers and artillery, had regarded his marriage as no more than a painful duty. The two women he had most deeply cared for had both died young; his mother, Eleonora of Aragon, the sister of King Federigo, had died when he was seventeen years old; his younger sister, Beatrice, had died in childbirth four years later. Alfonso’s secretary thought it was interesting to speculate on his master’s feelings toward the bride in whom he had appeared to show no initial interest. As he came to know Lucrezia better, however, the more interesting and attractive he found her; he actually sought out her company, grateful to have reason to disbelieve the stories of her debauched past. ‘Whatever his feelings were before he met her, before long he conceived,’ so it seemed to the secretary, ‘a love as ardent as was the aversion he had felt for her when the marriage had first been proposed.’

The wedding festivities continued for over a week. There were jousts most days in the great square in front of the palace, followed by banquets and balls every night. A troupe of actors performed the comedies of Plautus each afternoon, which the duke, determined to show off the quality of culture for which Ferrara was justly famous, had insisted were to be better than anything that Lucrezia would have seen in Rome. There were also the customary ceremonial offerings of presents to the bride and groom. The Venetians produced two superb mantles of deep red velvet, worth 300 ducats each. The French ambassador had brought expensive gifts from Louis XII: a rosary for Lucrezia, its beads of perforated gold filled with aromatic musk, and a shield for Alfonso, decorated with the figure of Mary Magdalene, which, the ambassador was at pains to explain, was to show that he had taken a woman of virtue, though all of those present had heard the rumours of incest and many believed that Lucrezia’s past, like the Magdalene’s, had been far from virtuous.

Lucrezia, it seems, thoroughly enjoyed the parties. Zambotti described her as being ‘full of life and gaiety.’ The pope’s daughter, so it was agreed, danced ‘admirably’ and dressed ‘beautifully.’ Duke Ercole was full of praise for the daughter-in-law he had been so reluctant to accept and seems to have become genuinely fond of Lucrezia, taking her, as a mark of his favour, to visit Sister Lucia da Narni, the nun she had helped to move from Viterbo to Ferrara. ‘Her virtues and good qualities have so pleased me,’ the duke wrote to Alexander VI about Lucrezia, ‘that she is the dearest thing I have in this world.’

Isabella d’Este and Elisabetta Gonzaga were less enthusiastic about their new sister-in-law. No longer in their prime, the Duchess of Urbino was thirty and Isabella just three years younger, while Lucrezia, despite her three husbands, was still only twenty-one years old. The two older women were clearly put out by the bride, who was undeniably younger and prettier than themselves and, moreover, took precedence over them at court.

The malicious Isabella did her utmost to make the unwelcome bride uncomfortable; ‘yesterday,’ she wrote grumpily to her husband in Mantua, ‘we all had to stay in our rooms until five o’clock because Lucrezia chooses to spend hours dressing so that she can put the Duchess of Urbino and myself into the shade in the eyes of the world.’ The Borgia girl, she complained, spent an unconscionable time dressing, washing her hair, and chattering in her rooms; she also declined to attend such festivities as did not appeal to her; and when a risqué comedy was performed, she was obviously amused by it, while Isabella made it clear that she, like all respectable ladies, found it most objectionable.

With the departure of the guests on February 9, Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, Lucrezia settled down to life at court as wife to Alfonso, the duke’s heir. On Maundy Thursday she acted as hostess for her father-in-law at the customary dinner given to 160 poor people, serving their food and assisting in the washing of their feet. The next day, Good Friday, she attended Mass in the cathedral, where the congregation was entertained by a Passion play, a five-hour spectacle with angels descending from the roof to hover over Christ as he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, his Crucifixion on a hill specially built in front of the high altar and his Descent into Hell through the head of a huge writhing serpent.

Yet as the days passed, she found life in Ferrara hard, homesick for Rome and her beloved father. She spent mornings in bed; she lay in the scented waters of her bath, accompanied by one of her young ladies, who, when they emerged, would read erotic novels to her. She passed increasingly long periods in the rooms that had been assigned to her with her Spanish attendants to whom she spoke in their own Valencian dialect and with whom the Ferrarese ladies were soon on the worst of terms. She even offended her conservative father-in-law, as she did many other Ferrarese, by introducing at court a Spanish costume, zaraguelles, wide, pleated pantaloons of silk or muslin worn under the skirt.

Duke Ercole, despite his affection for Lucrezia, was growing anxious about the cost of all the entertaining that he was expected to provide. Most of the marriage guests had departed; but several members of Lucrezia’s court remained, and ‘these women,’ her father-in-law complained, ‘by remaining here cause a large number of other persons, men as well as women, to linger on… [I]t is a great burden and causes heavy expense. The retinue of these ladies… numbers not far short of 450 persons and 350 horses.’ He also worried about the cost of maintaining Lucrezia’s large and mostly Spanish household, declaring that the number of his daughter-in-law’s ladies and servants must be reduced; and, despite her protests, he dismissed from her court all whom he considered unnecessary.

To the evident surprise of her critics, she accepted her father-in-law’s decision with good grace; and not only this, she set about conciliating the most critical of the Ferrarese ladies. Among them was a friend of Isabella d’Este, Teodora Angelini, who was frequently invited to dine at Lucrezia’s table, an enticing privilege, especially during Lent, when the duke’s table became excessively monotonous, while Lucrezia’s was plentifully supplied with a variety of dishes from oysters and scampi to sturgeon, crayfish, and caviar.

The extravagance of the meals served at Lucrezia’s table naturally horrified the duke. He consulted his daughter, Isabella, who declared that Lucrezia’s needs could easily be met by an allowance of 8,000 ducats a year rather than the 12,000 ducats that the pope was demanding for her. The duke offered to compromise by allowing her 10,000 ducats; this the pope refused; and Lucrezia, anxious to escape the acrimonious gossip that this quarrel was causing at court and, suffering the symptoms that told her she was now bearing Alfonso’s child, retreated to the convent of Corpus Domini.

The news that Lucrezia was pregnant, so soon after the marriage, delighted the duke and also the pope. ‘His Holiness has taken on a new lease of life in consequence of the news from Ferrara,’ wrote Burchard, ‘and every night he is commanding into his presence young women chosen from the best Roman brothels.’ As though in celebration of Lucrezia’s pregnancy, he also sent for Jofrè, Jofrè’s wife, Sancia, and even for Sancia’s lover, Prospero Colonna; one particularly lurid account suggests that the pope then left the two men in an antechamber while he took Sancia off to one of the private rooms from which he returned after a while to tell Jofrè and Colonna that she was ‘still worth the serious attention of a young man.’

The pope’s cheerful mood in hopes of a grandchild, however, were soon to end in disappointment and worry. In May Alfonso had left Ferrara on business, and Lucrezia had taken advantage of his absence to go to Belriguardo, one of the duke’s many villas in the countryside and where, she hoped, the fresh air and beautiful surroundings would improve her health. She had felt much better on her return to Ferrara, but the sultry summer heat in the city soon caused a relapse. By the middle of that hot July of 1502, she fell dangerously ill. Her husband was sent for; so were several doctors in addition to Francesco Castello, the court physician. The pope, gravely concerned, maintained that the illness had been caused by his daughter’s distress at being kept so short of money.

Meanwhile, the patient grew worse, suffering from paroxysms and fits of delirium. It was supposed, inevitably, that she had been poisoned; but it was soon clear that a virulent outbreak of the flux had gripped the entire court. Her condition grew worse, and it was widely feared she would die; her husband and her beloved brother hastened to her bedside and, miraculously, found her better, sitting up in bed. Days later she suffered another relapse; all August she lay close to death until finally, on September 5, she gave birth to a stillborn daughter.

Cesare arrived in Ferrara two days later to find her ill with puerperal fever and refusing to allow her doctors to bleed her. Cesare’s company seemed to rally her, and he induced her to give way to the doctors’ advice. ‘We bled Madonna on the right foot,’ one of the doctors reported. ‘It was extremely difficult to do, and we could not have done it had it not been for [Cesare] who held her foot, and made her laugh and cheered her greatly.’

Lucrezia recovered slowly from her ordeal, and when she was well enough to travel, she was carried in a litter to the care of the sisters of the convent of Corpus Domini. She was accompanied by her contrite husband, who, although he had made a vow to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin at Loreto, a place much venerated by those who experienced problems with conception and pregnancy, intending to walk the 170 miles on foot should God spare her life, he contented himself with travelling there by boat and then making one of those inspections of military establishments that he undertook so often.